IDC study finds Zscaler Data Protection can save $2.1 million annually

With today’s economic backdrop, saving money is always an interesting topic of discussion. If you’re looking to be the hero and help your company save money, this blog is for you.

A study led by IDC highlights the impact a cloud-delivered approach to Data Protection can have on the bottom line. Based on existing customers, Zscaler and IDC worked together to answer a simple question, “after deploying and using Zscaler Data Protection, how much of an impact has it had on your organization?”  

The results were eye-opening and underscored the power of the Zscaler Platform. Let’s explore the findings

Customer savings using Zscaler

Survey participants are global customers comprising tens of thousands of users and sizable, mature IT organizations, as seen in the following table.

What were the results across savings, both direct and indirect? When calculated across revenue gains, increased productivity for users, improved IT efficiencies, and security savings, the average Zscaler customer saved $2.1 million dollars annually, as seen in the following table.

That’s an impressive number, and something that can have a material impact on an organization. Let’s explore how Zscaler Data Protection helps drive increased value across these three broad topics: risk, productivity and efficiency.

How Zscaler Data Protection reduces risk

Traditional approaches to data protection struggle to secure cloud and mobility. Users are off-network and accessing their cloud apps over the internet. Centralized data center technologies just can’t follow these connections, and often struggle to scale SSL inspection, where most data loss hides.

With Zscaler’s cloud-delivered approach, all users, cloud apps, and connections are always protected from data loss. Organizations can deliver an always-on, consistent DLP policy and easily scale protection across data in motion, at rest, and in use. This drives down the costs associated with data loss across multiple vectors. Organizations can easily scale inspection across more transactions and data, and more data loss incidents can be detected.

These risk reductions can be very impactful to organizations. As told by organizations participating in the study:  

“There’s a huge risk with data loss through use of unsanctioned applications, and Zscaler Data Protection has given us the ability to block applications and repositories to which people submit data.

“It’s easier for us to meet SLAs (service-level agreements) in terms of how quickly we can detect issues with Zscaler Data Protection. Especially for PII and GDPR, we now meet 100% of our requirements.
 

How Zscaler Data Protection improves productivity

Another huge benefit of Zscaler Data Protection is the productivity it enables within an organization. Traditional approaches are often based on point product complexity. Companies organically build themselves into complex situations as they move from problem to problem purchasing individual approaches, which exponentially drive up operational cost and complexity, while taking a toll on their users. A hidden cost often overlooked is the time wasted among users who struggle with overly strict security policy or recovering from incidents that distract them from their job.  

With Zscaler, organizations can streamline security and empower users to connect from anywhere, seamlessly. Cloud apps become fast and responsive, while data loss incidents decrease. Additionally, IT teams can easily scale data protection to new cloud apps and areas of the business in nearly half the time as previous solutions, as seen in the following graphic.

What do organizations surveyed have to say about these productivity improvements?

“We need 5–10 hours per month to maintain Zscaler Data Protection, and we would have to double that and pay about 10% more for other tools.”

“We have two to three data loss incidents a month that are now no longer going to inappropriate locations because of Zscaler Data Protection, so our productivity loss due to data loss is basically zero. Before, if someone lost data, we’d have to figure out where it went and take steps to pull back the files.”

How Zscaler Data Protection improves IT efficiencies 

Many data protection programs struggle because operations become far too complex. Multiple teams must interact together, and the daily grind of managing alerts can lead to fatigue. Add to that reporting and visibility requirements that are difficult across siloed products, and you have a perfect storm.  

In this case, the power of a unified platform can’t be understated. Zscaler Data Protection combines all data protection requirements and visibility into one purpose-built SSE-delivered approach. When delivered in a unified fashion, operations become more efficient from a time perspective. All teams benefit, as seen in the following table.