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Are YouTube and Netflix Impacting Your Microsoft 365 Experience?

Zscaler makes it easy to prioritize business-critical applications over other types of traffic.

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Overview

The challenge of bandwidth control in the era of the cloud

Your applications are moving to the cloud and your internet traffic is growing, making it essential to prioritize business critical apps like Microsoft 365 (Office) over YouTube, live-streaming, and other traffic to ensure a fast user experience and fully realize the benefits of the cloud.
You may try to address these challenges by upgrading bandwidth before deploying Microsoft 365. However, most organizations still face network challenges and user experience suffers, despite increasing bandwidth.

>63%
reported problems related to bandwidth controls.
93%
reported that personal and entertainment traffic is favored over Microsoft (Office) 365.
>35%
reported they are unable to access business-critical applications including Microsoft (Office) 365.
The Problem

Traditional solutions are not enough

To route traffic locally and establish rules for bandwidth use, you can deploy next-generation firewalls or UTM appliances at each site. That said, this approach is expensive and difficult to manage, and user experience still suffers. Appliances are simply not designed for window resizing, and if there is a conflict, they'll resort to dropping processing for some packets and stopping video streaming.

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UTM/Firewall appliance spread

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Deploying and managing appliances is complex and expensive
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Degraded performance leads to hardware upgrades
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Bandwidth prioritization leads to packet loss and negatively impacts user experience
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UTM and firewall appliances are not designed to model bandwidth
The Zscaler Difference

Zscaler simplifies bandwidth control by moving it to the cloud

It's time to move your security and controls to the cloud. By implementing Zscaler Firewall and Bandwidth Control, both integrated with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ platform, you can route traffic locally to the internet, providing the same level of protection to all users regardless of their location, and apply bandwidth management policies to prioritize critical business applications.

Benefits

Transform with Zscaler

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Prioritize business-critical applications
  • Limit the impact of streaming media, file sharing, and social media on business apps
  • Identify bandwidth constraints before they impede the user experience
  • Align policies for all users to business needs, with granular rules by application class, location, and time
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Better user experience
  • Break out traffic locally for faster internet access
  • Enable secure access to both business and personal applications
  • Leverage window shaping and bandwidth throttling to avoid packet dropping and create a seamless user experience
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Reduce costs and simplify IT
  • Eliminate the need to purchase, deploy, and manage new hardware
  • Reduce MPLS backhaul costs by offloading internet traffic via local breakouts
  • Eliminate bottlenecks and WAN latency by enforcing policies in the cloud
  • Maintain unmatched security in all locations
Use Cases

Tailor bandwidth policies to align to business needs

Zscaler Bandwidth Control enables you to create and immediately implement granular policy. Typical bandwidth policies include limiting recreational traffic, such as streaming video, and giving business apps precedence over other traffic. With Zscaler, there are many more parameters you can use to define a policy. 

 

Here are a few examples:

 

  1. Prioritize Microsoft 365; guarantee 40%
  2. Restrict YouTube streaming to 20%
  3.  Limit large downloads (e.g., Windows or macOS updates)
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What’s Inside

Gain detailed bandwidth visibility

Microsoft 365 now prevails, not YouTube. Before Zscaler, YouTube accounted for this customer’s largest consumption of bandwidth. With easy-to-use Zscaler bandwidth controls, the company was able to reserve 40% of its bandwidth specifically for Microsoft 365 while capping YouTube.

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Schedule a Demo

Understand your threat exposure and how the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform can securely and quickly transform the way you do business.