Zscaler Internet Access Reviews

We use Zscaler as a secure internet proxy. All of the traffic is filtered through it. We have about 3,000 users at the organization. 

All internet traffic goes through Zscaler, which protects the organization's IP, which isn't published publicly. Zscaler's cloud services filter and clear all traffic. 

We like Zscaler's traffic filtering, web security, DLP, and IPS features. The real-time threat protection is excellent.

Zscale is providing a proxy IP, and most government sites will block traffic from a proxy. Also, we see some performance issues on the cloud side during DC failover.

We have used Zscaler for around three years. 

I rate Zscaler seven out of 10 for stability because we are still having some performance issues.

Zscaler technical support is okay. They have the technical knowledge needed to cover the market. 

Deploying Zscaler was moderately difficult. You don't need to create anything. We only needed to forward things to the Zscaler cloud, and they took care of everything on their side. We needed to establish a trusted network and create a channel between Zscaler, the DC, and our on-prem environment. 

Zscaler is more expensive than Fortinet or Palo Alto. It's 10 times more expensive than Fortinet. However, it's worth the price because of the cloud security features, and it gives us a single global control, which is why we chose this.

We also looked at Fortinet. We decided to go with Zscalare because we operate across multiple countries and want centralized control from a single dashboard at our headquarters.

I rate Zscaler Internet Access seven out of 10. We need a solution like this these days because we have remote users who need protection.

Generally, we use the tool for SSE and ZTNA. We offer all the features for cloud security, zero-trust network access, or CASB. Depending on the requirements, we sometimes integrate it with SD-WAN so that we can offer SASE-based services.

The solution's most valuable features are its reliability and availability, measured by the number of ports it offers. Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access are also good features of the product. For example, when it comes to the secure web gateway provided by Zscaler, I would say it is a very trustworthy area. The sandboxing or the DLP features can be provisioned on Zscaler, making it the value the tool offers to Zscaler Internet Access users. The tool has good reach across the globe. The number of PoPs the tool has is one of its USPs.

Sometimes, cost is one component that customers complain about, especially if they compare it with some of its competitors. Zscaler's pricing seems to be a bit on the higher side.

I think the pricing model is also something that the tool can probably look into to optimize or improve for the customer so that it can be a competitive tool commercially.

The solution's technical support needs to be improved, especially by offering a better support structure for different geographical areas.

I have been using Zscaler Internet Access for three to four years. My company is a service provider of Zscaler Internet Access.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The difference between Zscaler Internet Access and similar products can vary and be specific on a case to case basis. Sometimes, the customer says that if they can have a better tool in terms of flexibility when it comes to customization, then it would be good. One of the customers was saying that the SSL inspection is a bit heavy in Zscaler, and I thought that they have big overheads. These are a few things that I remember when it comes to the tool's cons.

The product's initial setup phase is easy.

The product's installation phase requires one to three L2 or L3 engineers who are enough. It will all depend on how many clients you have, how you are pushing the agents to the clients, or how you are integrating it all.

The ease of maintaining the tool will depend on which solution you are comparing it with, so if you compare it with other similar products, I think it is okay. It will all depend on what type of expertise you have on Zscaler platform in comparison with others.

The tool's SSL inspection feature is effective. Many of our customers are comfortable using SSL inspection and find it useful.

Some time back, I faced the challenge of integrating you with my customer's SAP infrastructure, but eventually, it was resolved with some permutations and combinations.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

The solution is used for security purposes especially. Any solution in the organization has its purpose.

We have been reselling this solution for more than five years now.

Zscaler Internet Access integrates effectively, especially with the high-level IP services. However, there are some challenges with new software development on the SD-WAN part and sometimes with routing of data. Issues appear sometimes with upgrades, but that's really an exception; it's not happening frequently.

Regarding scalability, it's a challenge for Zscaler Internet Access at this moment, so I rate it a seven.

For us, it's recent, but we are also a distributor and reseller, having been using and working with this product for more than five years now.

It's very stable; however, due to the success, they are slightly behind with resources. This includes following up on new opportunities and finding the right resources to be available for customers' questions when sold.

Zscaler Internet Access is quite expensive, but it delivers. Sometimes, depending on the customer and the service and why it's used, it's acceptable.

The deployment process for Zscaler Internet Access is quite straightforward. I think the success of Zscaler has had an impact on their resources.

The quality of technical support depends on which department you're reaching out to at Zscaler Internet Access.

Positive

We are providing installation and deployment for our customers with Zscaler Internet Access.

The installation may take a couple of weeks, but it depends on the customer. The experience I have until now is a couple of weeks.

The implementation is done together with the project managers of Zscaler Internet Access.

From our side, the whole process mostly involves the project manager that is dealing with the deployment.

I think as long as Zscaler Internet Access is stable, it can have some financial benefits. Until now, we can confirm that for a few customers I am working with.

Zscaler Internet Access is quite expensive, but it delivers. Sometimes, depending on the customer and the service and why it's used, it's acceptable. We get more and more reactions about the price going up, sometimes too much or too little.

For the stability of Zscaler Internet Access, I would recommend it, but for the price, I think it's too expensive. Most customers that use it have the money and want the whole package, a managed service. However, I think it should be less expensive because we're losing customers to the competition.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution an eight.

We use ZIA for outbound internet connectivity. The internet traffic of on-prem users will be directed to the ZIA cloud for security checks and web filtering. 

Zscaler does not provide dedicated IPs to each customer. Hence, they share a pool of IPs provided by Zscaler. There is a chance of blacklisting these IPs. I also do not like the multi-management portal. 

I have been working with the product for a couple of years. 

The product's stability is fine. 

ZIA is not scalable due to the limitation of bandwidth. My company has over 100 users for the product. 

ZIA's support is good. 

Positive

ZIA's setup is not easy because of the multiple clouds. 

ZIA follows a subscription model pricing and charges you based on the number of users. I would say its price is good. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. I haven't seen any unique competitive advantage for ZIA over its competitors. ZIA's offerings are offered by competitors as well. However, the product has good security features. However, I wouldn't recommend this product to organizations that require high-security features. I would recommend Palo Alto in those cases. 

Our customer already had the product, which they got from another vendor. They were facing some issues with their existing policies. Our role was to optimize the policy. So we optimized Threat Protection, DLP, and CASB policies per the customer’s requirements. In their environment, G Suite was completely allowed for some users, but they wanted only to allow a specific corporate domain. As per the recommendation, CASB policy must have been in place, but it wasn’t. So we optimized the tool as per their requirement and delivered it.

The product has different modules like SWG, CASB, DLP, and Threat Protection. The most valuable feature of the solution is SWG traffic. The product is very good in web traffic.

Cloud App’s database should be improved. Currently, they only support and provide granular controls to around 1000 cloud applications. In Netskope, it is more than 3000. Around 65,000 applications are visible to the users in Netskope, but Zscaler only supports around 3000 to 4000. Cloud App is not good. UI is not as easily understandable as Netskope. Netskope has a source, destination, and action policy. In Zscaler, we have to click multiple tabs to get it. It's a bit tricky compared to Netskope. Once we understand it, it's simple.

I have been using the solution for four to five months.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability an eight out of ten. Currently, the product is facing major issues in scalability because the company is over ten years old. The data center they have in India goes down frequently. VLANs also go down frequently. Due to this, the product gets turned off completely, and sometimes, the users go to different traffic. If it’s an on-prem user, they go via a firewall, which increases the pain for the customers. They have a problem with DC. VLANs go down sometimes. That's why the user faces complete disconnection issues for the proxy. Two people in the organization are using the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is just a plug-and-play process. When the Zscaler client is installed on the machine, it works like a normal proxy. They're connected to the cloud. The solution is deployed on all the users’ machines, and the management and policy creation is done at the cloud level. It's a cloud proxy.

The deployment is just a plug-and-play process. The policy is very simple.

We acquired a customer for optimization. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

Primarily, it was to replace our existing on-premises box infrastructure. That's what it started with. And lately, we've been using it more for secure web gateway purposes.

It's primarily meant for perimeter security and the ability to securely access the internet and SaaS applications. So that has definitely helped us get rid of our bulky firewall hardware firewalls, at least for internet access. So that's a cost optimization. And performance. It definitely helps us boost performance.

The ease of deployment is the most valuable feature. All it takes is building a few QRE or ITC tunnels and installing agents. It's a piece of cake. 

And the policies are very intuitive and easy to configure, with very little possibility of messing things up. I also like the great analytics and good visibility into the traffic that goes out of my organization. 

Shadow ID Discovery is also great for finding out what SaaS applications people in my organization are trying to access.

One thing that needs to be improved is their presence in China. I'm not sure if that's a Zscaler thing or if it's a problem with all vendors in this space, but it would be nice to have better coverage in China.

This concern is a common one for vendors across the board when dealing with the Chinese market. So, currently, there is the Great Firewall of China. This firewall can significantly impact internet performance for users in China. A better presence in China from Zscaler could mean more breakout points between China and the rest of the world. 

This would help to improve internet performance for users in China and make Zscaler a more viable solution for organizations with a presence in China.

I started using it in 2015, but then I used it intermittently for the next couple of years. But lately, I've been using it quite a lot. So I've been working with it for about seven years now.

Occasionally, I've faced challenges with applications going down, but these incidents don't usually result in disconnections. 

If I were to rate its stability on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most stable, I would place it around a seven, I suppose.

I've never encountered challenges where a client exceeded the bandwidth or processing limits of Zscaler. When you reach your peak, the solution is flexible enough to handle it. 

If necessary, you can provision another circuit to increase your Internet bandwidth and set up an additional enforcement point, which is essentially a Zscaler reinforcement point. So, it's highly elastic and scalable.

I would give scalability a perfect ten out of ten rating.

The customer service and support are fairly good. 

In terms of their technical capabilities, response times, and issue resolution, we've had positive interactions with their support.

Positive

The primary alternative for Zscaler is Prisma Access. It stands out as the strongest contender. Additionally, there's NetScope in the mix, although it's not a direct comparison. Another player is Blue Coat, or rather Symantec, now Broadcom. They also compete in this space. However, from what I've observed, most clients transitioning from traditional proxy setups tend to gravitate towards either Zscaler or Prisma.

Prisma Access extends beyond mere web security. This puts it in a separate category, making a direct comparison with Zscaler Internet Access somewhat challenging. Prisma offers a broader array of features, including threat profiling, threat intelligence, diverse integrations, endpoint security evaluations, and deep packet inspection. These are areas where Zscaler Internet Access falls short. Zscaler, essentially a cloud proxy, serves a specific purpose. 

On the other hand, Palo Alto Networks not only operates as a proxy but also incorporates firewall functionality. It functions as a service, includes VPN replacement capabilities, and encompasses features like antivirus, anti-spyware, and IPS for threat filtering. Palo Alto holds an advantage in these aspects. However, if your primary aim is to replace an on-premises proxy, Zscaler is the way to go. Opting for Prisma Access exclusively for proxy functionalities might prove cost-prohibitive.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one being difficult and ten being easy to setup.

With regard to complexity, it largely depends on the number of redundancies that you require. For example, if you just have a standby setup with maybe two or three Zscaler enforcement nodes that your tunnels need to terminate on, it's fairly simple. 

However, the more redundancy and higher availability requirements that the company has, the more complex it gets. So it can get pretty complicated if you have some crazy requirements with regard to high availability and redundancy.

You just need one person to deploy the solution. One person can mostly do it. A lot of parts as well. 

You would require an endpoint specialist; someone who manages the endpoints. Additionally, you might need someone from your SOC to ensure that you're able to ingest all the logs and security alerts that are being dumped into the same solution. Perhaps one or two individuals for testing purposes. The policy installation process is quite straightforward and shouldn't take a lot of time. One person should be sufficient for that.

We deployed the solution ourselves. We have a team of in-house experts who can troubleshoot any issues that may arise. We have also used Zscaler's professional services team on occasion, for example, to help us with sizing and design, or when there are complex requirements from our clients. But for the most part, we're able to handle the ZIA deployment ourselves.

Most standard deployments take around two weeks. For example, I deployed Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) for my previous organization, with 20,000 users in two weeks. However, I've also seen deployments for 50,000 to 60,000 users that took at least three to four months. 

The exact deployment time will vary depending on the size of the deployment, the complexity of the environment, and the specific requirements of the organization.

In a typical deployment process, the first step is to procure licenses. You can either do this yourself, or Zscaler can do it for you. Once the licenses are procured, Zscaler will create a tenant for your organization. This tenant will include the enforcement nodes that will be used to process traffic for your users.

Following this, the installation of Zscaler tunnels transpires, along with the deployment of the Zscaler Client Connector (ZCC) on user machines. Configuration of policies is then carried out, encompassing aspects such as policy definitions and potential additional inspection of HTTPS traffic. 

Moreover, ancillary facets are incorporated. These entail the establishment of compatible streaming services and TLS inspection. Integration with the corporate identity provider (IdP) is also a crucial step. 

Furthermore, if automation is a consideration, additional automation or orchestration components can be implemented to facilitate automatic policy enforcement. While integration with Extended Detection and Response (XDR) systems is conceivable, this is an aspect I have not personally done. This more or less encapsulates the overall process.

I would suggest knowing the use cases beforehand. Many customers I've seen aren't entirely clear about their specific use cases. They often dive into the product first and then work backward to identify whether Zscaler Internet Access aligns with their needs. Understanding your use cases is essential; it serves as a foundation for determining if Zscaler Internet Access is the right solution. If the required capabilities are already available, or if a few API integrations or lines of code can sustain the existing solution, that's worth considering. This advice isn't exclusive to Zscaler, but I've witnessed clients who become uncertain because they lack the necessary set of use cases that would justify their investment.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten for two reasons, namely, the China issue for the improvement section and the pricing is expensive. I am not sure about the exact price, but it is expensive.

The permission settings in the solutions are the most valuable feature in the solution since it allows me to assign roles and permissions.

I am just an end-user of the solution. I can't speak on what needs improvement from an admin's perspective. The interface of the solution needs to be clear and user-friendly. Currently, the solution's interface is not that user-friendly.

Zscaler is not like Okta. Okta has a marketplace, while Zscaler doesn't have one. Zscaler needs to have a marketplace.

I have been using Zscaler Internet Access for two years. I am using the solution's latest version. My company is just a customer of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine and a half out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My company has 200 users using the solution.

I rate the solution's technical support more than nine out of ten.

Positive

I rate the setup phase a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy. The setup phase was easy.

The cloud is deployed on-premises.

The time taken for deployment is around fifteen minutes.

One admin person is required for deployment.

I am not aware of the solution's pricing model since my company paid for the solution.

I like Zscaler Internet Access a lot.

There are some sites it fails to find and block, causing such sites to get away from Zscaler Internet Access.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

It's primarily for end-user access to the public internet. We use the proxy functionality and the URL Filtering.

We have a global policy for all our users. While there are a few categories of URLs that we are not allowed to do SSL inspection on, the primary function for us is to do SSL inspection so that we can make use of the built-in anti-malware and antivirus—the advanced-threat features—within the platform. We do SSL inspection of some 80 percent of all the traffic and we can evaluate if it's malicious or not.

It is a cloud solution where pretty much everything is handled by Zscaler.

Zscaler has helped to reduce the time we spend managing security policies. That is very important to us. A lot of the features it has are AI-based decision-making. For instance, if we implement a sandboxing rule for how files of a certain type should be inspected, we also can activate the AI decision-making process. That way, even if a file is new to the sandboxing environment, it can still see that it is a PDF and has these and these characteristics. Based on that, the AI says that "No, this file is not malicious," even though it normally would have been quarantined and sandboxed and have gone through the whole analysis process. The AI helps out in minimizing the time to do that analysis. And that also helps in reducing the burden of someone actually having to do things manually.

If you count everything that was involved in managing the appliances, the lifecycle management, and support contracts, in our old environment, we have reduced the number of FTEs managing the environment from five or six to about two.

It has also definitely helped reduce the number of infected devices in our organization by proactively preventing attacks. Since we scan almost all of the traffic, we now see how much of the traffic is "malicious." In our environment, we block about 1.6 million threats every quarter, but we don't know the severity of those threats. Maybe 1 million of them are malicious content in some way, while half a million are adware. But there are real threats that are being blocked, like botnet callbacks, cross-site scripting, and browser exploits. On average, we are blocking about 500,000 threats per month. 

There are a bunch of different capabilities that are valuable within the platform. We use quite a lot of them, but not everything. The ones that are most important to us are the URL Filtering and the application control. 

For our needs, the cloud-native proxy architecture is a very good solution. We are moving away from on-prem appliances and moving more toward cloud-based solutions. Zscaler is a good fit for our strategy. This architecture helps with cyber threats because we inspect most of the traffic and we can see that a lot of threats are stopped directly in the secure web gateway. But there are parts of it that we don't use yet, like the DLP functions. Instead, we are using the Zscaler Cloud Sandbox feature for content that is downloaded as files. We detonate the document in a sandbox and see if it's malicious or not.

It's a very easy-to-learn and easy-to-use platform, even for me as a more non-technical person. I'm still able to do a lot of work in this platform.

The reporting functionality could be a bit easier to use. There is a reporting function, but it's quite hard to do any good reporting, from a user-management perspective. For example, if a department manager wants to know how his department is using the web, there is a way to get the data, but it's quite cumbersome to get it and show it well. And that's true for comparing between departments. It's quite hard to get a good report. 

Another issue is that the API documentation could be a bit more up-to-date. They're implementing stuff, but not updating the documentation all the time.

We have been using Zscaler Internet Access for the last five years.

Since we have global reach, we are seeing a bit more instability in Asia, primarily in China, but I'm not sure that it's related to Zscaler. I think it's more due to how China does things in terms of internet access.

It scales very well, if you go for the cloud-based solution alone. In certain regions in the world, we have started to implement local appliances, like a VEN node, where we don't have good coverage from Zscaler's public data centers. But if you only use the public data centers, it's getting a lot better. A while back, there were 35 or 40 data centers that we could use globally, but now there are over 80. So the scalability is quite good for us.

Zscaler's technical support team is good at what they do, and they help us fix our problems quite fast. I would rate them eight on a scale of one to 10. There's always room for improvement.

We have had issues from time to time where they don't really see our problem as a problem, but we, as a customer, are being affected. They have a few different ISPs that take care of traffic to and from their data centers, and when their ISP is not performing, we, as customers, are suffering. There have been occasions when we have seen that our traffic is being routed very strangely within the Zscaler network, but they don't see that as a problem. We do, because all of a sudden, all of our Swedish users are going to the data center in Norway instead of Sweden. For Zscaler that is not a problem because they are still doing their job. But for our users, it's complicated because Norway is not part of the European Union, whereas Sweden is. If they go through the VEN node in Oslo, Norway, we cannot reach stuff that is EU-regulated, such as export and import functions within the EU. That is a big part of what we do. At times, it has been hard to get the Zscaler TAC team to understand that this is a problem for us, as a company.

Positive

We used to have an on-prem solution doing pretty much the same thing as Zscaler, but as our strategy is cloud-first and internet-first, we thought that we should also use a cloud-based solution. We started to look at the alternatives, five or six years ago. What we saw was that there was only one, at the time, that was mature enough for our needs.

Since then, Zscaler has evolved quite a lot. In the beginning, there was no Zscaler Client Connector, an agent on your computer. It was all cloud-based, but that changed about a half a year after we started to use Zscaler. We assessed whether Zscaler fit our needs or not and we saw that for 75 or 80 percent of our needs, it was a good fit. Some aspects were not mature back then but they have matured over time.

The initial deployment was quite straightforward. I wasn't really on board at the time the implementation of Zscaler took place, but overall, when new features and functionalities are added to the product, it's quite straightforward to implement them and to roll them out to large user groups, or globally. From a rollout perspective, it's quite easy to use.

Initially, one of our demands was that everything should be cloud-based, meaning we shouldn't have any agents on each computer. We learned the hard way that such an approach doesn't work well, because you need something to control the path from the user's computer to the Zscaler cloud. You need to be able to steer how the traffic goes. You can do that with PAC files. But ultimately, together with Zscaler, we figured out that a client was needed, at least for our needs.

Zscaler has helped us save costs by enabling us to decommission all of our legacy proxies. We had at least nine locations with appliances, and we had multiple appliances per location. It has helped us save money.

We have also seen ROI in terms of the cost of both the lifecycle management and the service and support contract that we previously needed. We have saved quite a lot there. I don't know the exact numbers, because I'm not in charge of the finances, but if you count the resources needed to manage the platform, we have saved up to 45 or 50 percent of the cost we used to have.

Back then, there weren't many other cloud-based solutions available. There were hybrid models, but we wanted a completely cloud-based solution. 

At the time, Symantec had the beginning of a cloud-based solution, but it was very immature and it didn't work as well as Zscaler. Zscaler had been around since around 2010 and was five years into their journey, while Symantec was only a year or two into their journey. We opted for the most mature at that time.

Since then, we have looked at other solutions, including Netskope and a few others. They are similar in their design, but Zscaler has features in its design that make it stand out from the competitors. For instance, their scanning methodology is something like, "Scan once, analyze many times." That means there is a one-time scan of the traffic, but with multiple different threat engines, for antivirus and anti-malware, et cetera. And they do it only in the RAM memory of their cloud solution machines, which makes it super-fast. They can scan a lot of traffic in a very short amount of time. That part is something that a lot of other vendors are not doing. They're scanning in sequence, not in parallel.

Make use of the Zscaler Client Connector as much as you can, with all of the functionality that comes with it. Also, do not allow the users to disable the Zscaler Client Connector, because then you don't know if traffic is actually going through Zscaler or not. If it's always on, you know that if something is not working, it's your policies that are doing something to the traffic. We used to make it possible for a user to disable the Zscaler Client Connector, which then made it impossible for us, as the team that troubleshoots problems, to know if the traffic was actually going through Zscaler or not. If you don't have that control, you don't know where the problem is. Now, at least we know that it's either on the client or it's on Zscaler or it's on the destination that they're trying to reach.

As for saving time with this system versus deploying and managing traditional network security hardware, it depends on how you build your management of the solution. We have opted for a solution where we manage everything centrally. We have one IT team that manages all of the Zscaler Internet Access policies and settings. But there is an option, and it's one of the strengths of Zscaler, to delegate control of parts or all of the solution to other teams. For instance, you could have URL Filtering policies that are managed by a local IT team in a given country. We don't do that. We manage everything from one team and we control everything, for our whole organization, from this management platform. We control the forwarding policies, the application access policies, the URL Filtering policies—pretty much everything.