Here’s an interesting short article about OKTA that just showed up on SA. There’s some issues raised with respect to Zscaler as well. I haven’t done any follow on research as yet, just wanted to bring it to the attention of the board in order to get some input from others - - -
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4210179-billion-dollar-unic…
I don’t know that I would worry to much about belmoths horning in.
I have observed that most are quite like dragsters, or giant earth moving machines. They are really, really good at what they do.
When you take a dragster to go get diapers you run into all kinds of problems. Same with earth moving machines, really hard to park.
Cheers
Qazulight
Well, it’s not just Cisco, although I wouldn’t be too quick to underestimate them. But it also looks like OKTA is getting into the ZS territory if I understand what the author wrote, which I might not. There wasn’t a lot there to go on, but enough to make me think I (we) should dig deeper.
Okay is not getting into Zscaler’s business, and Cisco is on record stating that the SWG market will be a multi billion dollar market and dominated by Zscaler, Cisco, and Symantec. You an interpret the mention of Zscaler by Cisco in any manner you want. Put it into the context that Cisco knows Zscaler very well given they tried to buy Zscaler pre-IPO.
Okta is part of Zscaler’s software stack for identity management just as both Zscaler and Okta are part of VMWare’s software stack, and Zscaler is the best method to secure Office 365 from Azure as it is integrated into the product and into Azure and its hardware infrastructure around the world. This is one reason why so many of Zscaler’s customers come from customers switching to the cloud, and the premiere cloud product is Office 365. Salesforce is up there as well and they are a partner with Zscaler, etc.
Zscaler does not do identity management and Okta does not do malware and other gateway security functions of the like that Palo Alto or Cisco do. And only Zscaler does it as a cloud only SaaS offering. You can look at iBoss to see another visionary company, but smaller, that is trying to address the same issues that Zscaler addresses. Other than this they are all appliance hardware companies who cannot afford to leave their legacy business models that require expensive and cumbersome appliances on premise.
Tinker
Thanks Tinker, but what do you know about OKTA’s acquisition of ScaleFT? I’d never heard of them. I don’t know if it’s h/w, s/w or both, but I’m guessing s/w. Their model is trust noone and nothing. Blurb on their j=home page reads, “Our mission is to enable customers to deploy Zero Trust Networks easily without sacrificing user experience”. I’ve just started to look at there web site (https://www.scaleft.com/). From what I can gather so far it appears that the offer authentication services for users and devices. But they do seem to have some cloud network security stuff as well. I’m going to be in a remote area of China for a couple of days so I won’t have a chance to review this any further for a while.
<<<ScaleFT’s platform is built to address this problem. Based on the Zero Trust model, ScaleFT does not automatically grant access merely based on a correct username and password. Those inherently insecure static credentials are instead replaced with ephemeral client certificates scaled to the scope and context of the user’s request, and are valid for only a limited time. The result? A dramatic reduction in exploit risk.>>>
Brittlerock, it is identity management. It does nothing in regard to malware. It guards against access to the network by unauthorized people. It does not guard against software attacks like malware and viruses. Thus it is still a part of the Zscaler software stack, but operates w the same zero trust model w in its own security layer of identity management, which is an important subset of overall security, but a subset. Does not overlap Zscaler but supplements.
Tinker