Hmm, I liked ZScaler as an investment, but this video is simply not compelling. If anything, the first 2/3 of it actually makes me question my investment in the company.
The first and third examples - of Outlook and Jira access - are simply not true today. My own company, not the most modern being founded in the mid 20th century and not using ZScaler, has enabled access to Outlook email, Sharepoint, and Jira without requiring that a VPN be stood up. So the comparisons there in the ZScaler video are just wrong. And I’d be surprised if my company was state of the art. I’ve posted here previously what Microsoft documents on how to setup Outlook 365 to enable secure access without VPNs (and without using ZScaler). ZScaler simply isn’t required for allowing access to Microsoft SaaS services without a VPN.
The second example was “won” by VPN, but, OK, it’s silly.
The fourth example, of having to re-establish a VPN session when you switch Wi-Fi networks, is again dependent on needing VPN. With things like Outlook and Sharepoint not requiring it, only legacy corporate storage “drives” need that. I’ll grant that if the connection drops you have to re-establish it, but again, at my company I almost never use VPN. For doing work on a plane, I haven’t had the need ever.
Where ZScaler does have an advantage comes about 2/3 of the way into the video - and that’s for spying on users. Since every time a user attempts to access something, that access is or isn’t granted by ZScaler, it makes sense that ZScaler knows who’s doing what. Of course, without ZScaler you just look at the logins to the specific services (Outlook, Jira, etc.) to get the same information. And even with ZScaler if you want to know what the user actually did there you have to go to the specific services anyway. I get that it takes a little longer since it’s not centralized like ZScaler, but that doesn’t seem to be a big deal to me.
Finally, I’ll grant the network performance debugging advantages of ZScaler. But compared to today’s non-VPN required access, putting ZScaler in the middle can only slow things down.
Maybe some ZScaler expert can show me where I’m wrong?