It’s time to pop the champagne! We are thrilled to announce that Zscaler has been honored with the prestigious CRN "Product of the Year" award for data protection in the subcategory of customer need. This recognition is a testament to our relentless pursuit of innovation and commitment to delivering best-in-class solutions for our customers and partner ecosystem. We couldn't be more excited to accept this award and share our excitement about Zscaler Data Protection with you.

About the Award

The CRN Products of the Year Awards acknowledge top IT products and services that showcase cutting-edge technology in the industry. These awards recognize innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of the IT channel and its customers.

For the 2023 edition, the CRN editorial team selected winners in 33 technology categories.

To ensure a fair judgment, the finalists were evaluated by solution providers with real-world expertise, who scored them based on factors like technology, revenue, profit, and customer demand.

So without further ado, let's jump into our favorite category—data protection—and how Zscaler was able to take home the prize in Data Protection for the sub category of Customer Need.

Zscaler Data Protection Recognized a Winner

CRN’s data protection award category covers a wide swath of concepts around data loss; from system failure and disaster recovery to cyberattacks and human error.

It’s telling that Zscaler was called out in the subcategory of “Customer Need”. While system failure and disaster recovery are important to data hygiene, there’s nothing more top of mind and important to organizations than protecting data from malicious or accidental loss.

Why did CRN and the channel community give Zscaler Data Protection the nod? Let's take a look:

Zscaler Data Protection: Stopping Malicious Exfiltration

One of the biggest challenges partners need to solve for their customers is the protection of distributed data. Data is the lifeblood of an organization, and keeping it safe is one of the main focus areas for CISOs and Security Architects. The challenge is most organizations' security architecture is not just designed for data protection in a cloud and mobile world. However, with Zscaler’s cloud-delivered approach to data protection, that all changes.

As a purpose-built SSE cloud platform, Zscaler Data Protection is a core component of its architecture. Delivered from the cloud, all users, devices, and cloud apps are always routed through the Zscaler cloud. This ensures every transaction across an organization is always inspected and protected. This allows organizations to retire costly appliances and data center security in favor of a more agile, cost-effective cloud-delivered model.

Because the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange consolidates all security services into one platform, both Security, Data Protection, and Zero Trust Network Access, live in harmony. Centralized across the Zscaler platform, IT administrations get one central policy architecture that streamlines user, device, and cloud app protection. With Advanced Threat Protection, DLP, CASB, SWG, ZTNA, Firewall, Sandboxing, and Digital Experience Monitoring, organizations get everything they need to ensure threat actors can’t steal your data or put your or your users at risk.

While stopping external threats is key, sadly, organizations need to ensure internal malicious activity is also kept in check. Users often take data to their next job, or engage in suspicious activity that hints at malicious activity. With Zscaler Endpoint DLP organizations can lock down devices so USB, network shares, and printing don’t pose a risk to data, while advanced UEBA helps quickly identify user behaviors that fall outside of norms - like bulk uploads or suspicious login activity

Zscaler Data Protection: Preventing Accidental Data Loss

Great data protection also requires looking at what sometimes is your biggest liability - your users. After all, they are the ones handling your data, and they often don’t have the best data protection habits - or just don’t know better. This is another area in which Zscaler Data Protection excels.

Securing data from accidental loss starts with inline inspection. Built around an enterprise-grade DLP engine, Zscaler’s cloud-delivered platform enables organizations to ensure all data—across all connections and SSL—are inspected for data loss. Even BYOD connections become less risky, as Zscaler Browser Isolation enables you to stream data as pixels, thus ensuring the actual data doesn’t land on the unmanaged BYOD and walk away. Because Zscaler is delivered inline across the organization, shadow IT and cloud app control become a snap. You can quickly see all unsanctioned app activity and shut down cloud apps that are deemed too risky for your data.

For sanctioned cloud apps that you own, Zscaler CASB provides full control over data residing in your platforms like Microsoft 365 or Google. IT teams can ensure risky data sharing by users is revoked, and leverage Zscaler’s security engines to quickly find and quarantine malware residing in your cloud apps. Lastly, Zscaler AppTotal and posture control enable you to scan your Cloud and SaaS Platforms for dangerous misconfigurations or third-party integrations and close these holes. As many of the largest data breaches have been due to misconfigurations, this is an important step in the data hygiene process

Where do we go from here?

Winning a CRN award in the category of Data Protection is truly a fantastic accolade, so we do want to thank CRN for their recognition. We also feel nothing speaks more loudly than the testimonials of our customers. To that end, if you’d like to hear what they have to say, you can hear about their successes here.

We also thank the channel community for their continued support and commitment to Zscaler. It’s humbling to be part of such a strong movement to help companies along their digital transformation journey. We promise to continue to innovate and deliver impactful solutions that solve real customer problems.

Lastly, if you’re currently a Zscaler partner, please visit our partner portal, where you can learn more about selling Zscaler Data Protection