How the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Saves Money for Customers

Organizations today are faced with a stark economic reality. From inflation and tariffs to increasingly intense competition among businesses, there are countless factors challenging everyone to do more with less. In the midst of all these pressures, cybersecurity is one area where there cannot be any compromises, where quality cannot be sacrificed in the name of cost. That’s because a single breach can be disastrous. Despite this, even security teams are not exempt from the demand to reduce spending. So, what are they to do?

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange provides a zero trust architecture that systematically minimizes the risk of cyber breaches (you can learn how it does so here). Uniquely, as the platform improves organizations’ security postures, it simultaneously saves them money. 

ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) recently published an Economic Validation Report that explores how the Zero Trust Exchange cuts costs for customers. In particular, the report looks at six key categories of savings available with Zscaler, and offers quantitative examples of the financial benefits that customers typically receive. Throughout the rest of this blog post, we will provide a high-level overview of these six pillars of economic value. 

1. Optimized technology costs

Zscaler delivers a zero trust architecture that eliminates network-centric architectures and the costly tools that constitute them, including firewalls and VPNs. It connects entities directly to apps without routing traffic through the corporate network, which helps organizations minimize private networking costs. Additionally, the Zero Trust Exchange is a comprehensive platform that secures any-to-any communications and provides a wealth of functionality, enabling it to take the place of dozens of point solutions like secure web gateway, data loss prevention, sandboxing, and more. Because Zscaler is delivered as a scalable service from the cloud, it also allows organizations to avoid extensive capacity planning and overprovisioning, and eliminates the rigid CapEx of hardware with a flexible OpEx model. 

2. Reduced operational complexity

Traditional architectures require numerous security and networking appliances that need ongoing change implementation, creating a management burden for admins. Zero trust, on the other hand, is delivered as a fully managed service from a cloud native platform, with Zscaler implementing patches, updates, and more on the customer’s behalf. Additionally, as mentioned above, Zscaler consolidates a wide variety of functionality into a single platform that can protect data and stop threats throughout the IT ecosystem—eliminating the need to manually duplicate policies across disjointed point products. All of this translates to operational simplicity, time savings for admins that let them focus on value-added projects instead of menial tasks, and, as a result, a reduction in management overhead.

3. Increased business agility

To capitalize on business opportunities, organizations in today’s fast-paced world must be able to expand or modify their operations quickly and securely. But network-centric architectures hinder their ability to do so. Built on rigid appliances, these architectures lack the flexibility to scale operations dynamically and safely, making tasks like adding business units or branches complex, time-consuming, and risky. Fortunately, the Zero Trust Exchange is a scalable, secure platform that enables organizations to spin up new users, apps, clouds, and locations both seamlessly and safely. Additionally, during mergers and acquisitions (M&A), direct-to-app access with Zscaler empowers customers to forgo network integrations entirely, eliminating complexity, scope creep, and cost while accelerating M&A time-to-value. 

4. Improved security posture

Cyber breaches can waste money for organizations through IT downtime, remediation costs, legal fees, compliance penalties, customer churn, brand damage, and more. Fortunately, the Zero Trust Exchange reduces the risk of breaches (and their costs) in four key ways. First, it minimizes the attack surface by eliminating firewalls, VPNs, and their public IP addresses, which can be found by criminals on the web. Second, it stops compromise as a scalable cloud platform that can inspect all traffic, even encrypted traffic at scale, and block threats therein. Third, it prevents lateral threat movement by connecting entities directly to apps instead of the network. Fourth, it stops data loss across all potential leakage paths, including TLS/SSL traffic, SaaS apps, email, and endpoints. 

5. Enhanced user productivity

Traffic is typically backhauled to a centralized data center for security and connectivity (even for remote users accessing cloud apps), but this adds latency that slows users down. The Zero Trust Exchange delivers secure, direct-to-app connectivity from a global cloud and at the edge—it even accelerates user experiences by routing traffic via the optimal path to its destination. And with Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), it can provide full visibility across the entire user connection as well as AI-powered root cause analysis that intelligently pinpoints the causes of performance issues. This is a departure from siloed monitoring tools that foster blind spots, require manual correlation of data, and slow troubleshooting. Overall, Zscaler saves time for end users, NetOps, and service desk teams, and maximizes productivity. 

6. Other business considerations

In addition to the above, Zscaler helps organizations save money in other key ways. First, it eliminates the power-hungry appliances of network-centric architectures through a multitenant cloud platform that runs on 100% renewable energy. This decreases organizations’ electricity requirements, carbon footprints, and power bills. Next, with full visibility into shadow IT (and shadow AI), Zscaler allows organizations to uncover the tools employees use, identify redundancies, and optimize their spending on applications. Finally, organizations that deploy zero trust architecture with Zscaler tend to receive lower cyber insurance premiums. That’s because insurance providers recognize that zero trust makes breaches much less likely, decreasing the odds that they will have to pay out to their customers. 

Conclusion

In times of economic uncertainty, organizations must cut costs wherever and however they can—and even cybersecurity is not spared from the mandate. Fortunately, with Zscaler, security teams can do their part in saving money while simultaneously reducing cyber risk. 

To see more about the savings Zscaler offers (including real-world numbers achieved by average customers), read the ESG Economic Validation Report.

Or, to learn more about the security benefits of zero trust, sign up for our introductory webinar, Zero Trust 101: Start Your Journey Here.