Reporting from Zenith Live 2025: Transforming Healthcare IT with Zero Trust Branch and Cloud Segmentation

This is part of a series reporting live from the floor of Zenith Live 2025, where I’m sharing the latest innovations Zscaler is rolling out. Today, we’re spotlighting Zero Trust Branch and Zero Trust Cloud Segmentation, which are new capabilities designed to help healthcare organizations simplify complex infrastructures while strengthening security.

What’s New in Zero Trust Branch

Healthcare providers often face the challenge of transitioning from legacy architectures like MPLS or SD-WAN to a Zero Trust model without interrupting critical applications that can’t just be “cloudified” overnight. Enter Zero Trust Branch with Dynamic Tunnels—a brand-new feature designed to bridge that gap.

Dynamic Tunnels enable healthcare IT teams to securely and efficiently connect branch locations to data centers, maintaining compatibility with legacy systems while moving toward a Zero Trust architecture. They also support features like Source IP persistence, which often requires a routed tunnel. This means your outpatient clinics, imaging centers, and specialty offices can begin their Zero Trust journey without the disruption or rework that typically comes with ripping out existing networks.

For healthcare organizations, this capability offers a practical path forward—modernizing at a manageable pace while preserving vital access to older yet mission-critical applications. It’s all about transitioning on your terms, with less downtime and fewer headaches.

What’s New in Zero Trust Cloud

As healthcare organizations increasingly adopt hybrid and cloud-based environments, securing workloads and ensuring compliance across those infrastructures has become critical. Zscaler’s new Zero Trust Cloud capabilities, announced today, make this shift smoother and smarter.

The new Cloud Gateway feature offers fully managed Zero Trust connectivity for cloud resources, deployed in just a few clicks. This isn’t just a technical convenience—it’s a must-have in healthcare IT. Auto-scaling, per-endpoint policies, and complete infrastructure management mean cloud security no longer requires manual oversight or constant tuning. Your team can focus on patient care and operational goals while Zscaler handles the heavy lifting.

Another exciting addition is microsegmentation within the cloud. Powered by machine learning, this feature analyzes traffic flow to recommend and enforce optimized resource groupings. Forget having to ask, “What ports does that application use?” Instead, you can focus on real-time policy creation by learning an application’s behavior, locking down policies much like you do with users today through Zscaler Private Access.

Why These New Features Matter for Healthcare

1. Transition from legacy systems at your own pace while maintaining critical application access.
2. Simplify secure cloud adoption, eliminating the need for complex configurations or manual management.
3. Gain deeper visibility and stronger control over cloud workloads to support compliance and protect patient data.
4. Build a future-ready IT architecture that’s scalable and resilient.

Healthcare IT is under pressure to deliver more with less—more security, more performance, more flexibility—all while meeting compliance requirements and ensuring high-quality patient care. These new Zscaler capabilities provide a practical, scalable path forward.

I’ll be sharing even more insights from Zenith Live 2025, so stay tuned for what’s next in this series.