What Does Migrating to a Cloud Native Security Platform Involve?

Understanding Cloud Native Security Platforms

In the early days of digital transformation, security made sense as a stack of appliances inside the company’s headquarters—where users and data mostly lived. But as organizations opened more branches and added remote work, maintaining appliances for every site—or backhauling traffic to a central location—became unwieldy and inefficient. Even moving appliances to virtualized instances in the cloud didn’t fundamentally change the model: teams were still managing hardware or virtual boxes, patching systems, and juggling maintenance across many locations.

Cloud native security takes a different approach, delivering protection as a streamlined service directly from a global cloud platform, not an appliance in a rack or virtual machine. There’s no hardware to maintain, and no need to route traffic through a central hub just to access security controls. With security delivered as a service, organizations gain flexibility—security is available wherever users, devices, and applications are, without the headaches of appliance management or location-based limitations.

This shift has also transformed how teams manage security day-to-day. Instead of wrestling with countless point products and multiple dashboards, businesses can unify controls under a single cloud native platform. Capabilities like authentication, data loss prevention (DLP), analytics, and compliance monitoring are integrated, so admins work from one interface, see the full picture, and respond more efficiently. Ultimately, cloud native security matches the speed and reach of the way people work today, letting organizations stay agile and protected as they grow.

Why Migrate: Key Benefits of Cloud Native Security

Elevating security through a cloud native model can transform how enterprises operate and protect their data. Here are five core benefits that highlight the shift away from legacy on-premises methods:

• Scalability and elasticity: By eliminating reliance on appliances, organizations can receive security as a high-performance service that can rapidly adjust to spikes in traffic and easily scale up or down as business needs change.
• Reduced complexity: A cloud native security platform simplifies ongoing management by consolidating a variety of security functionality into a single offering and delivering it as a service, eliminating the need for disjointed dashboards and appliance maintenance.
• Automated updates: In a cloud native security model, vendors handle deployment of the latest patches and threat defenses directly to the cloud platform, saving time and effort for administrators—who no longer need to manually manage updates for individual appliances.
• Consistent policy enforcement: With a global cloud platform, security policies are applied uniformly everywhere, overcoming the inconsistencies and management burden of scattered appliances.
• Enhanced visibility: Cloud native platforms can easily inspect encrypted traffic—now the vast majority of web data—and detect threats or data loss within it, thanks to scalability that traditional appliances can't match.

Common Challenges in Cloud Native Security

Shifting away from traditional infrastructure and embracing cloud-born security can face unexpected obstacles despite the clear benefits of doing so. Whenever such issues arise, they must be navigated carefully. 

• Inertia: Teams can resist moving off familiar systems, despite the clear advantages and efficiencies that cloud native security models can bring.
• Perceived loss of control: Relying on vendors for change implementation such as applying patches and updates may feel risky to some, but it frees up admins for higher-value work rather than basic maintenance.
• Fear of poor resilience: Some worry that cloud services may not be as reliable as in-house solutions, but major providers—whose business depends on uptime—typically deliver greater resilience and faster recovery than most organizations can achieve on their own.
• Belief that it’s too expensive: While cloud native offerings may seem costly to some, the fact remains that they eliminate heavy upfront spending as well as ongoing maintenance tied to appliances.

Cloud Native Security Platforms vs. Traditional On-Premises Security

Moving from a traditional setup to a cloud native security platform brings clear differences in deployment, management, and scalability. The table below offers a concise view of how these two models compare:

Best Practices for Migrating to Cloud Native Security

A few guiding principles can make the journey smoother for any organization. Here are five key best practices:

• Conduct comprehensive assessments: Start by thoroughly inventorying all digital assets and workflows. Use these insights to design a migration plan tailored to address immediate risks while supporting long-term cloud security objectives.
• Adopt zero trust principles: Ensure that the cloud native security platform you deploy provides zero trust architecture and functions based on the principle of least-privileged access. Building on top of zero trust ensures that all capabilities are as risk-reducing as possible.
• Implement multi-faceted protections: Strengthen your security posture by layering adaptive access controls, modern threat intelligence, and robust data safeguards—extending these protections seamlessly across your users, locations, and clouds.
• Train security teams early: Invest in ongoing education and hands-on training for your professionals as they migrate. This empowers teams to maximize the benefits of cloud native platforms and respond quickly to emerging threats.
• Secure buy-in across teams and leadership: Foster alignment from networking and security practitioners through to the C-suite. Unified support ensures resources, priorities, and risk tolerance are understood and migration progresses smoothly.

Zscaler’s Cloud Native Zero Trust Exchange Platform

Zscaler delivers the unified, cloud native Zero Trust Exchange platform that redefines cybersecurity. It provides secure, zero trust, any-to-any communications as a service—without extending the network to anyone or anything (unlike traditional architectures that focus on the network both for connectivity and security). 

Zscaler minimizes risk, reduces complexity, and enables digital transformation at scale. The platform’s AI-powered architecture minimizes the attack surface, stops compromise, eliminates lateral threat movement, and secures data. It streamlines secure access from any location and for any entity, including users, workloads, IoT/OT, and B2B partners, aligning perfectly with the agility and resilience goals of modern cloud migration. 

• Secure: Zscaler protects workforces, branches, and clouds from cyberthreats with AI-powered, zero trust security, minimizing the risk of cyberattacks and data breaches everywhere.
• Simplify: The platform reduces IT complexity by replacing multiple point products and appliances with a unified cloud native service, streamlining management and lowering operational and infrastructure costs.
• Transform: Zscaler boosts agility and performance by enabling secure, seamless access to any destination from anywhere, eliminating bottlenecks, and driving successful digital transformation for modern, cloud-first organizations.

Ready to see how Zscaler can transform your security posture? Request a demo today.