This week, Zscaler achieved an important milestone in our commitment to serve our U.S. federal government customers when Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) became the first and only zero trust remote access service to achieve the FedRAMP-High authorization.
FedRAMP is the government’s “good housekeeping” seal of approval for cloud computing, designed to reduce risk with an “evaluate once, use many times” approach.
The High designation means Zscaler has demonstrated we meet 421 different security controls, and are certified to manage and protect the government’s most sensitive data, including that which involves the protection of life and financial ruin, for example personal identifiable information (PII), law enforcement data, sensitive financial information, and protected health information (PHI). Zscaler is the only company rated High which conforms to guidelines from the government about securing trusted internet connections (TIC 3.0).
I’m proud of our team’s hard work. And it comes at an important time—every federal CIO is working to give employees the ability to meet the nation’s needs while working from home. Supporting these efforts, Zscaler is helping our government customers ramp up remote work faster than many thought possible, and this certification signals we can secure an even broader range of agency workloads than in the past.
Both government and private industry must shift away from using legacy (20-year-old) VPN technology that doesn’t scale and is not secure. ZPA is a zero trust solution that allows trusted users to connect directly to cloud applications without being placed on the network, which dramatically reduces cyber risk. And since our cloud has more than 150 data centers around the world, we significantly improve the employee experience with reduced latency and the fastest possible connections. The experience is identical whether the agency application is hosted in the government data center, or in destination clouds such as AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, or the Google Cloud Platform.
Government customers managing remote teams (and more BYOD devices than ever before) also rely on Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) to deliver the security stack as a service from the cloud, eliminating the cost and complexity of traditional secure web gateways. Employees get a faster experience, and IT leadership can easily scale protection to all users regardless of location while keeping the network and appliance infrastructure simple.
For federal customers, this means employees stay safe and productive, focused on their mission of keeping the country running and delivering services to all of us.
As we talk about the “new normal,” the reality is we don’t yet know what this will look like. We do know that our organizations are putting processes and technology in place that will help us be as prepared as possible to meet future unexpected events. And, very likely, improve how we work and live on a day-to-day basis.
Zscaler remains committed to helping all our customers, employees, and partners remain safe by enabling them to work from anywhere. Please accept our best wishes for your good health and that of your families.
Jay Chaudhry is the Founder and CEO of Zscaler
