Zero Trust for Users: ROI, Resilience, and the Future of Workforce Security

When offices dissolved into kitchen tables, coffee shops, and airport lounges in 2020, it wasn’t a temporary pivot — it was the opening salvo of a new order. Hybrid work didn’t just decentralize the workforce; it redefined the scale and speed of global businesses.

Organizations expanded into new markets without establishing physical offices, geographical boundaries blurred, remote markets became hotspots of global supply chains, deals closed faster, and partnerships formed overnight.

Here’s what kept CISOs up at night: everyone connected to the enterprise  (employees, contractors, partners) operated inside its ecosystem. They all needed access. They all touched its data.

The old perimeter didn’t stretch, it snapped years ago.

The hybrid workforce turned legacy security into a liability, one that slows people down, strangles M&A value, and leaves the door cracked open for attackers.

VPNs, Firewalls, and the Myth of Modern Security

Five years on, too many organizations are still leaning on pandemic-era tools meant as stopgaps, and the cracks are impossible to ignore.

VPNs were built for an era when “remote work” meant the occasional business trip. In 2025, forcing entire workforces through them is like trying to patch a typewriter to send emails. They slow teams down, throttle SaaS performance, and create single points of failure. Worse, once credentials are compromised, attackers have free rein across the network.

Firewalls and appliance-based Secure Web Gateways promised visibility and control but deliver latency and blind spots instead. They were never designed for an encrypted, mobile, cloud-first enterprise.

Today, over 95% of web traffic is encrypted, but legacy firewalls and SWGs lack the processing capacity to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt traffic at scale. Most sample only a fraction of SSL/TLS sessions, leaving encrypted tunnels as blind spots for command-and-control communications, data exfiltration, and zero-day malware.

Static signature-based inspection is also obsolete as threats constantly morph and abuse trusted cloud services. Hardware appliances constrained by throughput can’t decrypt inline without breaking apps or adding latency.

The result is a trade-off no security leader wants to make. You either decrypt selectively and risk exposure, or decrypt broadly and risk performance collapse.

The same legacy thinking stalls M&A integrations. Stitching networks together and provisioning VPNs means newly acquired teams can’t access ERP, CRM, or collaboration tools on Day-1. Productivity suffers, and value creation slows.

Third-party access faces similar constraints. Vendors and contractors still get blanket VPN access or are forced into rigid VDI environments. In both cases, access control is coarse-grained, typically network-level rather than application-specific, making it difficult to enforce least privilege or prevent data sprawl.

Your Network Isn’t the Perimeter — Your Users Are

Most enterprises still bolt their defenses to the network. That’s the problem. Users don’t live on the network anymore, and applications don’t sit neatly in data centers. They’re in the cloud, in SaaS, and scattered across hybrid environments. 

That’s the essence of Zero Trust for Users, Zscaler’s solution for connecting every user to every resource that they need—securely, quickly, and reliably. Instead of extending implicit trust to anyone “on the network,” every single connection is verified in real time: Who are you? What device are you using? Where are you connecting from? What app do you need? Based on those signals, you get just enough access to that one application, for that one session. Nothing more.

Think of it like this: legacy security is a bouncer who checks your ID once at the front door and then lets you wander the entire club. Zero Trust is a different kind of host. Someone who escorts you through the club and checks your badge at every room, every time, and only lets you in if you belong. And unlike the bouncer, they don’t slow the line; they make the whole place safer and faster. Your Zero Trust access solution is a concierge with access to tools like:

Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA): Delivers inline inspection and threat prevention for all internet and SaaS traffic. Decrypts and inspects 100% of SSL/TLS sessions at scale, applying advanced DLP, CASB, and sandboxing inline without latency trade-offs. Eliminates backhauling and hardware bottlenecks through a distributed cloud enforcement fabric that scales elastically to user demand.

Zscaler Private Access (ZPA): Delivers secure, identity-based access to private apps without putting users on the network. Outbound-only connections prevent lateral movement and IP exposure, while granular segmentation enforces least-privilege access across hybrid environments.

Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX): Monitors end-to-end user experience across devices, ISPs, networks, and apps, correlating telemetry to pinpoint latency or network issues in seconds. Uses synthetic transactions, packet capture, and performance baselines to optimize digital experience without compromising security enforcement.

Zero Trust Browser: Secures web-based and third-party access sessions by executing them in a controlled, isolated environment. Prevents data exfiltration through inline redaction, clipboard and file-transfer controls, and pixel streaming. Shields backend applications from direct exposure while maintaining seamless user experience and native browser compatibility.

Privileged Remote Access: Enables agentless, just-in-time access for admins via SSH, RDP, and VNC — without VPNs or jump hosts. Sessions are fully isolated, recorded, and command-controlled to prevent credential misuse and lateral movement.

Zero Trust Firewall: Applies Layer 7 inspection, DNS filtering, and IPS across all ports and protocols. Uses AI-driven correlation to block command-and-control traffic, encrypted payloads, and evasive threats, replacing legacy firewall, IPS, and DNS appliances.

Cloud Sandbox: Analyzes unknown files inline, detonating them safely to uncover zero-days, ransomware, and fileless malware. Integrates with ZIA and ZPA to block new threats before they execute or reach users.

Zscaler Risk360: Together with ZIA, ZPA, and ZDX, Zscaler Risk360 extends the Zero Trust fabric into continuous risk intelligence, correlating user, device, and threat telemetry to quantify exposure and feed dynamic policy decisions within the Zero Trust Exchange.

The beauty here isn’t just the tools themselves. It’s the unification. One policy fabric. One global enforcement layer. 

Ready for Action from Day One

Picture a VP of Sales connecting to Salesforce from an airport lounge. Under a VPN, her traffic hairpins through a corporate data center, crawling along at dial-up speeds. Under Zero Trust for Users, her traffic goes direct-to-cloud, inspected inline, and delivered without friction. She closes deals while her peers are still waiting for their dashboards to load.

Now take third-party access. A vendor needs GitHub and Jira, not ERP or HR systems. With a VPN, you’re stuck with two bad options: over-provision access and hope nothing breaks, or funnel them through a clunky VDI. With Zero Trust for Users, you grant time-bound, app-specific access that’s fully auditable. They get the tools they need, nothing else, and access vanishes the moment the contract ends.

Likewise, during an acquisition, a global enterprise needs to provide access to email, collaboration, and ERP systems to their newly acquired company in a remote region with limited IT capabilities. With traditional approaches, that means months of painful network integration and risky trust extensions. With Zero Trust for Users, the parent company applies its existing Zero Trust policies to the new workforce instantly.

Day-1 secure productivity. Day-1 value delivery.

And beyond access and performance, Zero Trust for Users reduces the entire IT stack footprint — removing VPN concentrators, firewalls, SWGs, proxies, DLP appliances, and VDI infrastructure. The result: simplified operations, predictable OPEX, and a measurable drop in total cost of ownership.

This isn't a theory. It’s Tuesday morning in a global enterprise.

ROI That Builds Resilience

A critical consideration in any technology transition is the reduction of cost. In this case, technology cost reduction comes paired with reduced complexity and increased agility. 

Independent studies put hard numbers on the shift. We're talking 267% ROI with Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and 289% ROI with Zscaler Private Access (ZPA).

Customers report up to 75% reductions in IT operational effort, 65% reductions in breach costs, and as much as $1.75M in annual infrastructure savings. They are also reclaiming thousands of productivity hours, in some cases 20,000 engineering hours a year.

When measured holistically, Zscaler’s Zero Trust for Users solution set doesn’t just pay for itself.  It consolidates entire categories of legacy tools, from firewalls and VPNs to on-prem DLP and SWG appliances. Every tool you retire is a cost avoided, every redundant license a budget reclaimed.

That’s beyond just defense—it's a dividend.

But here’s the kicker: it’s not just about saving money. It’s about resilience. M&A deals that don’t choke on IT integration. Supply chains that actually collaborate instead of finger pointing towards each other. SaaS migrations without the CIO pacing the carpet.

In a boardroom obsessed with both revenue velocity and risk, Zero Trust is no longer a line item. It is a growth strategy disguised as security.

From Policy to People: Building Trust Where the Users Are

The borderless enterprise has markedly changed over the past five years, and change won’t stop in the next five. Clearly, many organizations still have work to do on their cybersecurity transformation and governance. Yet, despite the plethora of articles and advice aimed at guiding boards and their CISOs, the evidence continues to show a persistent “gap” between strategy and execution.

The future of enterprise security won’t be measured by how many boxes sit in your data center. It will be measured by how securely your people can work from Day 1, whether they’re full-time employees, contractors, or the newest members of your post-M&A team.

That’s what Zero Trust for Users delivers:

• One unified fabric for employees, third parties, and acquired teams.
• One policy for SaaS, private apps, and internet traffic.
• One platform that makes work faster, safer, and easier — from anywhere.

If your current model can’t deliver that, it’s not just outdated, it’s holding your business back.

Want to get started? Speak to one of our experts for a free consultation.