Zscaler Internet Access Reviews

We use the solution for web security services such as DLP, VPN, BPA, ZIA, and CASB.

We needed a solution to control the user traffic on the internet earlier. But now, with Zscaler's help, we can adequately handle the data using CASB. Also, we can control URLs and Web accesses with the help of its web security gateway feature. Along with this, we are controlling the data leak assessment on the internet with DLP's help.

The solution's most valuable feature is the well-structured functioning of services. It allows us to monitor things in the best possible way. It has all the features separated well from each other. For instance, they have a separate portal in case one wants to control anything on the internet. The other valuable feature is its ability to audit the reports well.

They recently improved a few things with the new version. They should enhance the audit reporting feature. They are providing a very basic DLP solution, but it needs improvement. If they improve the DLP solution, it will be a better solution in the future. They should work on the bandwidth of the CASB solution as well. 

We started the solution's POC in October but it is not yet fully deployed.

The solution’s customer service is good.

Positive

I have done the POC for Cisco Umbrella and Netskope before. Netskope is a user-friendly solution. But Zscaler is better than other solutions regarding its monitoring services.

The solution’s setup is pretty straightforward, but it depends on your experience with Zscaler. It would get a bit difficult for a new buyer owing to multiple profile setups and configurations during the process. I rate the solution’s initial setup as a nine.

I rate the solution's pricing as seven. It is costlier than other solutions. They have multiple standard licenses, but there is no additional cost included.

If you want to establish the right controls from a web security perspective, it's one of the best products in the market. Again, opting for the solution depends on the particular requirement. If you are looking for a solution for banking services, then, you should go with Symantec Blue Coat for a better DLP solution. But if you need a mix of VPN, CASB, and Web Security Gateway, then Zscaler is the better solution.

I rate the solution as an eight out of ten.

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.

I like the granularity of the control of all the traffic, including SSL inspection. I also like the fact that the user interface is intuitive.

The latencies with Zscaler are minimal compared to those of any other competitor. Other competitors do not really have the global scale that Zscaler has and cannot promise low latencies.

Zscaler should continue to make the user interface better. They should also improve the backup network and continue to expand it so that it can handle larger numbers of customers.

We've been working with this solution since 2017. Our customers use a cloud deployment of this solution.

The stability overall in the developed regions, such as the US and Europe, is fairly good. In certain regions, such as South Africa, Zscaler has not been stable for some time.

It is easy to scale. Additional sites and licenses can be added quickly and easily.

Zscaler's technical support is not too bad. They have been helpful when I have had issues, but I have not had to contact them much.

The initial deployment process is quite easy. I've implemented Zscaler Internet Access in large, multinational corporations and recently at a company that is in 64 countries in the world. The deployment is always fairly quick. I have also worked with smaller clients, and Zscaler deployment is even easier in these cases.

Zscaler is an expensive solution, but it's worth the price. 

Their services are unmatched by competitors. Some may come with half the features that Zscaler can offer and be much cheaper. However, they do not have the global coverage that Zscaler has, and they will not provide the same low latencies and the same speeds that Zscaler can.

My advice would be to ensure that you have a good implementer and reseller who can provide guidance. The reseller should be aligned with those who work in security and needs to be aware of anything that might need an exception that needs to be created. This will help avoid any surprises when the solution is live. The other important aspect to consider is training.

Overall, I would rate Zscaler at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use the solution for internet access, web-based policies, and application-based policies. It has a device posture profile, which is new. 

DNS security is in progress now. I have done the test cases in my lab, however, now we are deploying it for 30,000 users. I'm working on that project as well. Apart from that, I have worked in ZIA's firewall and DLP.

The product is simple yet has a lot of features.

It offers a straightforward setup process. Setting up the solution is simple.

The solution is stable and reliable.

Users can scale the product.

There are some flaws which I don't like. Mostly I was an engineer for the proxy. In that case, there are limitations. There are limited categories and limited URLs which we can create.

We'd like to see a more user-friendly interface. 

Technical support could be better. They should be more technical. Also, they need to ensure when you ask for help, they communicate better amongst themselves what the issue is so that customers aren't constantly repeating themselves. 

I've been using the solution for about one year. 

It's quite stable and offers good performance. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable.

It's scalable and easy to expand. 

We have multiple clients that use the solution. We have between 8,000 and 50,000 clients. 

I've contacted technical support multiple times. They are okay. However, they could be better. We sometimes need more technical responses.

Often, our support person will change, and then we have to explain over and over the issue, what went wrong, and what's been done. It may take days to resolve things even if it is a simpler case due to the repetition and the fact we are changing from support staff to support staff. 

Neutral

The solution is very straightforward and simple to set up.

Users just decide if they want to connect via desktop or remote VDI servers, and that's it. They decide on what ports and protocols they want to connect. Once that question is clear, then they just have to just create the connection between the cloud and between the enterprise. After that, it's all about the configuration once you are done on the portal.

I don't deal with the licensing aspect. I can't speak to pricing. 

I'd rate hte solution seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for a secure web gateway and secure internet access. 

We wanted something for an overall internet access solution, an in-office, and out-of-office solution. We chose Zscaler Internet Access. 

It is very transparent. 

It securely transfers internet connectivity seamlessly, without any problems or issues. It's very simple for the user. 

The product offers easy deployment. 

Security is very strong. There is seamless integration as well.  

There is no lag in service when accessing the internet. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

It is scalable. 

The solution is stable. 

The technical support could be better. We need more of an online knowledge base, so we don't have to lodge tickets whenever we have a question or issue. 

We'd like to have more plugins and integration. 

Even in a CASB scenario, if we could get API and JSON-contained decoding, that would be helpful.

I've used the solution for over a year. 

The solution is stable and secure. We haven't had any issues. The product is great.

We have more than 1,000 people using the solution. 

The scalability is really good. We've had no issues with the scalability. We even don't know when the performance tuning is happening in the back end. The user is not experiencing any problems, even if all thousand-plus users have started using it at the same time. There's no slowness or lag which is experienced.

We use it on a daily basis and plan to increase usage in the future. 

If you want some support, you have to log a case. However, if there was more online support or a knowledge base that was readily available, it would be better. 

Positive

The set up is very straightforward. It's a pretty easy process. The deployment scenario is pretty simple. You can just deploy it through a simple policy. You can deploy it even in terms of the distribution of hardware to users. 

To set it up took about three and a half weeks, from beginning to end. 

I'd rate the ease of deployment at a four or 4.5 out of five. 

After it is set up, there isn't really much maintenance. 

We handled the deployment in-house. 

After three or five years, after not having any bad experiences, we can see some ROI. 

The solution is quite expensive. It's around double what others are offering. The price we pay includes everything. It comes as a bundle. 

I'd rate the affordability of the solution at a two or three out of five. 

While the product quality is very good, the price is very high.

We have looked into Netskope.

I'm an end-user. 

I am dealing with the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. The only downside is that it is so expensive. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. It's deployed on a private cloud through Zscaler.

We mostly use this solution in the distributed network where direct internet access has been growing. There are a lot of branches connected with their own internet access, so the solution secures the connectivity at remote locations. There's a very large network with many branches and users working across the globe.

There are about 5,000 people using this solution in my organization. Technical support uses this solution 24/7. We have an operations team and a monitoring and management team.

This solution helps to protect our network.

The cloud proxy and integration are some of the key features. Since there is cloud waste, we can quickly provision it and start working on the configuration. On top of that, they have added a few more features. They have integrated CASB, and file sandboxing is part of it.

We have used this solution for three years. We have seen a lot of traction in the market and a lot of users adopting this solution. We're able to control or manage all the remote locations from one place. When a user is traveling from one location and is connected to the internet, it connects to the bigger cloud and relevant policies will be applied to the user or the device. We have expanded the base from very few users to a large number.

The solution is expensive. They recently revised the pricing and packaging. Some of our existing customers have been asking for alternate solutions for a lower price.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It's stable.

It's scalable.

Sometimes I feel that the Zscaler team is a bit lacking. The response is slow sometimes.

I would rate technical support three out of five. 

Setup isn't complicated.

I would rate setup as four out of five. Setup took a couple of hours because of some of the requirements. It can take up to a month depending on how many policy configurations need to be done and how many users there are.

Deployment was done in-house.

There are multiple bundles: enterprise, business, and transformation. Transformation includes all the features, but recently I've seen a few more line items that are additional costs. Overall, it's expensive.

They have standard bundling and additional licensing, which is a high cost.

We also evaluated Blue Coat. We have used Forcepoint too, but there were a lot of support challenges. That's why we went with Zscaler.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten. 

The product is pretty good. They are the leader, as far as Gartner Magic Quadrant is concerned. The functionality and bundling are good, but the pricing isn't great. I think Netskope is competition because of their features and better pricing.

The competition offers more flexibility. This is a cloud solution, so a lot of banking customers and government customers are a bit reluctant to use it. Some of the competition has the on-premises model as well. Zscaler could also work on their bundling, packaging, and pricing.

It's a proxy solution, and we use it for reverse proxy, DNS security, and storage security.

The users are at different locations, and Zscaler helps us to put the organization's central security controls on these roaming users.

The performance needs improvement. Some areas create performance issues and, depending on the use cases, require reconfiguration to perform again.

I've been using this solution for one and a half years.

It's on Zscaler cloud.

I find Zscaler to be very stable.

It's very scalable because it's the cloud version. We have 100,000 users across all levels.

I would give technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We previously used Westcon-Comstor, which was on-premises, but with Zscaler, we moved to the cloud solution.

The initial setup was pretty easy. The deployment took about three months.

Our team of two members along with Zscaler's team implemented the solution.

We have seen an ROI. This is a well published product, and you get value for your money.

Because it's a cloud solution, we pay on a yearly basis. It is affordable and includes tech support and all features.

Each use case is different, and you have to evaluate it and take the risk.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zscaler Internet Access at nine.