Enterprises worldwide are producing and delivering products enjoyed by customers in countless industries, and though the products may vary widely, behind the scenes, almost all these enterprises operate similarly. They utilize on-prem data centers and cloud service providers to deliver applications for use by employees, sold by partners, purchased by customers, or a combination of all the above.
Of course, these applications need to be resilient, reliable, and secure. Otherwise, employees cannot be productive, partners will have a hard time selling, and customers will purchase something better.
Meeting these application criteria for enterprises is a constant challenge. It doesn’t help that many enterprises are using outdated network security solutions—like VPNs and firewalls—to secure their applications. Unfortunately for organizations, these solutions of yesteryear are no longer adequate for the cloud.
A commitment to success
Zscaler is different. We’ve built a platform that rises to the challenge to secure user connectivity to applications and the internet. And now, the same security Zscaler customers use to protect their users can now be applied to their workloads.
Zscaler for workloads provides the protection and performance required to enable secure cloud workload connectivity, whether it is to the internet, to another workload on a different cloud platform, or to another workload within a VPC/VNet. Enterprises can secure access to applications for employees, partners, and customers to enjoy.
An example of success
One longtime Zscaler partner and customer understood these aforementioned challenges all too well. In one conversation with them, they shared the challenges they had and explained how they were able to successfully overcome those challenges with Zscaler solutions. Here’s a quick summary:
Desired Business Outcomes:
Overall, our customer’s key objective was to deliver secure workload access to the internet and private applications. As part of their key objective, they also wanted to:
- Effectively scale the delivery and management of secure internet access.
- Consolidate the services they use in order to more easily support the growth in cloud infrastructure, user base, and businesses.
- Ensure security compliance as more of their workloads move to the cloud.
- Enable flexibility in choice of cloud service provider for their business units.
- Reduce capital and operational costs related to legacy infrastructure and security.
Challenges:
Like many large organizations, this customer managed thousands of workloads across thousands of different cloud accounts (10k+ workloads, 1k+ cloud accounts). The sheer volume of workloads and accounts they manage and secure inherently translated to high costs and complexity. Additionally, the outcomes they wanted could not be sufficiently fulfilled by legacy network security solutions. When breaking things down, common themes started to appear, including:
- Managing the high cost and complexity of using and managing multiple products like squid proxies, NAT gateways, firewalls, and URL filtering.
- Maintaining approved denial lists and open source proxies.
- Applying consistent security policy enforcement across different cloud infrastructures and managed cloud applications
- Controlling rising operational costs from workload traffic being backhauled from the public cloud to data centers
The solution:
By working with this customer, we found that Zscaler for Workloads was the right choice to overcome the challenges they had and achieve their key objective of providing secure workload access to the internet and private applications. The benefits they gained included:
- Stronger security: all global internet-bound workload traffic, both encrypted and unencrypted, is inspected. They were able to provide consistent security and data protection policies by removing the need for multiple products.
- Simplified connectivity: direct-to-internet connectivity and multi-cloud connectivity via the Zero Trust Exchange eliminated their need to backhaul traffic from the cloud to their data centers for inspection. Our ability to provide automated setup and rollout also simplified many of their tasks.
- Scalability: they can now leverage the scale and availability of Zscaler’s global presence to support the 10,000+ workloads they have in AWS and Azure.
- Reduced cost and complexity: our customer was also able to consolidate multiple products like squid proxies, NAT gateways, firewalls, and URL filtering. They have a centralized control plane which provides simplicity in automating, managing, and enforcing their security policies. They also were able to reduce costs by avoiding traffic backhaul to data centers.
Gain zero trust for your workloads
Our customer’s challenges and objectives are not uncommon. And existing network and security solutions found in the market can partially help organizations, like our customer, with their cloud security. However, there is a reason our customer specifically chose Zscaler to help secure their cloud workloads.
To learn more about Zscaler for workloads and how it can help you secure workload access to the internet and to private applications please visit our solution page.
For a deep dive into Zscaler products and services and how our platform can uniquely benefit your business, schedule a chat with one of our experts.
