Zscaler Private Access Wins CRN Tech Innovator Award for Delivering Truly Comprehensive Zero Trust

Each year, CRN's prestigious Tech Innovator Awards celebrate the forefront of technological advancement, honoring products and services that redefine possibilities for solution providers in the tech channel.  We are thrilled to announce that Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) has been named a winner in the CRN® 2025 Tech Innovator Awards. 

This prestigious award is powerful recognition of our vision to deliver ‘Zero Trust Everywhere’. It affirms ZPA as the industry's most comprehensive Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution, capable of securing any user, on any device, to any private application.

Customer Obsession: The Engine of Our Innovation 

The CRN Tech Innovator Award specifically recognized ZPA's unique ability to handle one of the most difficult challenges our customers face when adopting zero trust: securing network connected resources. Systems such as VoIP, server-to-client (S2C) applications, and active FTP are often incompatible with standard proxy-based ZTNA architectures, as they require direct IP-to-IP communication.

This forced organizations to rely on traditional VPNs for these specific use cases. The result was a disjointed and risky environment, burdened by increased cyber risk and the operational overhead of managing multiple remote access solutions.

Zscaler’s award-winning approach solves this problem elegantly while adhering strictly to zero trust principles. ZPA establishes a dynamic, alternate path from the Zscaler Client Connector to the Zero Trust Exchange, ensuring secure, policy-based connectivity for these specific network segments.

Supporting VoIP and S2C Apps Without Compromising Security

Instead of providing broad network access, our solution enforces least-privileged access through policies based on user identity, device health, and contextual factors. Using a cloud-based overlay, it ensures continuous verification for both legacy and modern applications. Key components like gateways and application connectors create encrypted, outbound-only tunnels, eliminating open inbound ports for enhanced security. These tunnels securely transfer traffic while preventing lateral movement or unauthorized visibility. 

By combining network-level connectivity for services like VoIP with ZTNA’s granular access controls, it reduces attack surfaces, streamlines management, and meets the demands of distributed environments.

Now, customers can adopt zero trust and completely retire VPNs, thereby improving security, reducing costs, and enhancing productivity with seamless access experience. This CRN award reinforces what our customers already know: Zscaler Private Access provides the completeness, scale, and security needed to power the modern, work-from-anywhere enterprise.

The Zscaler Advantage for Partners

For partners, this represents a powerful opportunity to differentiate Zscaler offerings with proven, award-winning zero trust capabilities across our portfolio. By helping customers overcome long-standing network security and remote access challenges without firewalls or exposed IPs, they can drive holistic transformation, and grow recurring revenue with a secure, modern zero trust platform. 

To understand further how ZPA secures applications like VoIP, we invite you to read our Solution Brief on ZPA for VoIP & Server-to-Client Applications.  

Learn more about the recent innovations in the ZPA platform.