Zscaler Internet Access Reviews

The solution is a cloud service, so when you have Zscaler Internet Access, you still often require firewall appliances at the edge to act as gateways to Zscaler. There are certain elements that you can't necessarily ever extract at a network level, which makes it difficult to go completely appliance-less.

You could see it as a downside, but if there's an unavoidable reality of how networking is addressed at this point, and I think that's the only thing that for us is unfortunate, having to always retain some type of alternate firewall or router capability inside the network in order to get to Zscaler, as an example.

We've noticed a trend of Linux support being available at a mobile and workstation level, which isn't available from Zscaler yet, but we are expecting it soon. Zscaler also doesn't offer easy Cisco Meraki integration, which is also on the roadmap, even though we've seen it becoming very common. If we try and use Zscaler with Meraki, it's a fairly manual process to get Meraki to connect to Zscaler, whereas in all other SDware products, there's a lot more automation. 

The only other thing we would love to see in Africa would maybe be an additional Zscaler hub in another strategic location like Kenya to really round out Africa because there are only two hubs in over 30 countries on the continent. One is in South Africa and one is in Nigeria. Africa is kind of a black hole for all cloud providers, which makes life tough for us because there are performance issues when delivering cloud-related services. A little bit more penetration into Africa would help with this.

At a platform level, it's very stable.

One of the primary features of Zscaler is that it's obviously infinitely scalable. That's one of the reasons we like it. It takes away the bottlenecks that we've seen in appliances historically. You can typically grow quite fast.

As long as the platform that they have, that we're connected to, is scaled property, which is their responsibility, then it should be very good. We did hit a problem a while back where they didn't scale properly and we had some major issues. We just hope that it'll never be repeated. It's all about how they manage it, however.

We have about 80,000 users right now. We're selling to more customers, so we're trying to double that number in the next 18 months.

Technical support has been generally very responsive at picking up the tickets in a fairly short amount of time. My experience has been very good.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest thing for us was to build our own policies. The deployment itself was only a few hours.

We are an integrator and a service provider for Zscaler in the region, so we handled the implementation ourselves.

We have seen an ROI, but the return of investment isn't really as strong as we would like. That has more to do with the reality that South Africa is a very unique and difficult market and the rand depreciation has made all global services expensive in this market. Zscaler, however, leads the local market in value versus functionality. 

Roughly, we might spend $70,000 a month on the solution.

We don't pay for anything beyond the standard licensing fee.

We work with the customers that use a range of different types of proxy services. In my personal experience, I've only ever used Zscaler.

We use the ZIA Business Suite, a version of Zscaler Internet Access.

We use the public cloud deployment model.

The solution is very straightforward. That's what we like about the cloud - all the capabilities that are there, and that are available immediately.

There are things customers really have to have before they integrate the Zscaler. They need to understand ADFS and have it integrated properly into their own network. As long as the customers that you work with do the work required of them before integrating Zscaler, then it's seamless. The problems we encounter happen when customers don't get to the point they need to in order to take it on as a product. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

We leverage it for web proxy and web security.

All internet access flows through the Zscaler proxy, regardless of whether people are in office or remote. I have greater control site access and I minimize the number of compromises that we experience to almost none.

Generally, the web proxy feature blocks malicious sites so that my end users don't inadvertently get compromised.

It needs better integration with other applications. It takes a fair amount of regular activity to apply the by-passes because it is very strict in its restrictions and frequently you have to go in and open things up to allow the workforce to work.

The logs that are consumed by our security solution could be a bit more definitive, from an audit perspective. It's sometimes difficult to determine which end user a particular generated alert is associated with.

Stability is good. We have a presence around the globe, it's very localized and that minimizes any kind of latency. Even though they still complain about it.

Scalability is good. Right now our internal workforce is around 120. I have no plans to increase the usage for now. They do have some features we don't use currently.

Technical support is effective.

In the past, we did use some other products. We used OpenDNS which subsequently became Umbrella. Zscaler is easier to manage than OpenDNS but now I think that product is even.

There is a short learning curve on the setup, so it's not complex, but it's not necessarily trivial either. The entire deployment took two to three hours. 

We have about 1.5 persons who manage all of our internal IT apps.

We did the implementation ourselves. 

There aren't any additional costs to the standard licensing fees.

Pay attention to the Zscaler recommended best practices. Don't try to figure it out on your own. Go with what they say to do.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

The product is an endpoint solution for private and internet security. I use it myself in my home office. I'm in sales. I use it as an endpoint solution for my laptop, for my device, in order to get access to some internal service applications, such as pricing and time management tools.

Zscaler is a very stable solution.

The security is excellent.

I don't know whether it's Zscaler or not, however, sometimes I can't access my time management. I need to wait and try again a few hours later. Typically, if I let some time pass, I can access it again.

From time to time, there's instability in terms of the user experience. I don't know whether it's Zscaler or the time instrument server itself. I don't know the root cause here, that this is the only thing, that causes me issues. Otherwise, I'm quite happy with it.

The solution should do more in regards to handling phishing emails. They maybe should pair with a solution like Palo Alto in order to offer a more holistic view of the security and offer behavioral analytics or endpoint protection, etc., and all from one vendor. Data Lake, for example, is a product that gets the information and gives feedback to the user. There seems to be a high volume of phishing emails that we get, and I'd like to understand what the company is doing to address that. Zscaler seems like it's just a bit too static.

I've been using the solution for four years.

Aside from issues I've had accessing time management from time to time, it seems to be a stable solution.

The question of scalability would be best posed to our CSO. However, my whole team uses it. It's been scaled in our organization to a very small extent. In that sense, it was easy to scale. 

I don't know the maximum capacity, however, it's my understanding that the solution is suitable for organizations like us with about 3,000 employees.

We have our own technical support. I've never directly contacted Zscaler in order to get assistance.

I purely go to our first level of support. Any issues I've ever had have been solved on the first or second level. It's my understanding, that if the issue exceeds a certain level of support, it would be forwarded to Zscaler. However, I've never had issues of that nature. The only issues I've dealt with have been rather easy to solve.

We were previously using Pulse Secure in our organization. I needed to switch it on and off. On top of that, certain applications I could not reach. This was slow and proved to be unstable.

Zscaler, on the other hand, is more stable and also more secure.

The initial setup was straightforward. It wasn't complex at all.

My understanding was that the deployment itself happened pretty quickly.

There was an announcement from our security, and by our CSO. Then it was rolled out and Pulse Secure was turned off. There was a migration phase in the project and that's it. It all happened rather fast.

I don't handle billing or payments and therefore don't know the exact pricing of the solution of what exactly our organization pays.

I wasn't involved in the decision-making process when it came to looking for a solution.

We're just a customer.

I would recommend other users also have a glance at other solutions. Options like Prisma Access by Palo Alto or Check Point may be ideal, depending on the needs of the business.

Zscaler seems easy to understand and easy to use, however, there is probably some room for improvements. At my former company, we were using Check Point. This was also pretty good. Zscaler seems more modern, however, I'm referencing an experience from some 10 years ago.

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

We use it for security. We installed it on our work computers and also for other traffic from the office. We are using it for perimeter security and that is useful for us.

I will give you an example. Before implementing a computer scan on all PCs, our main problem was when we received a phish or something like it. It was impossible for us to tell if it was people from inside or outside our organization that clicked on it. If people that were inside our organization had different appliances for checking the traffic, you had to connect each appliance and get the receipt from that URL. It was a little bit complicated. With the scanner, for example, if somebody clicks on a bad URL you just add that to the reporting part and in a matter of minutes it generates a report, where you can see exactly who clicked on that link and who did something before you got a chance to block that malicious URL. That is the first benefit that comes to my mind and I think it was a huge improvement in our site. Having a centralized firewall that protects the whole topography is quite awesome when you also have users that are not on the plan because it actually improves visibility of those users.

I cannot say that I found only one feature that is most valuable, but I can tell you that I find value in traffic scanning and samples. That I think is quite valuable for all their software. The scanning feature is impressive, because they do not introduce a big latency to the traffic. I really like how they manage this part.

On the technical side, the only thing that I believe this scanner can improve is in the way they allocate traffic. For example, a big site doesn't have the ability to have its IPs inside the cloud, so Zscaler doesn't allocate you certain IPs for traffic. Your traffic goes to the nearest Zscaler point, and from there you get an IP. Sometimes that is problematic, because your users use the same IPs that another client is using so you don't get the ability to do some rules using some IPs. For example, you cannot use conditional access to high influence IP. You can't say if somebody goes to Zscaler I know that traffic is secure so I can let them past. In this scenario you cannot do this, because Zscaler is using a pool of IPs and they'll circle them for all the clients. I would like to see the ability to choose a pool of IPs for my company, set up rules based on them, and know that those IPs are not used by other companies.

We've been using Zscaler for 4 years.

The product is mature. I can't say it's not stable. It's been there for a while now and it proves that it can do the job according to what they say they do. I cannot say that they are not doing the best of what they think they should do. So at this point, they have a mature product and are working quite okay.

There are no issues there. The number of users doesn't matter, whether you have 100 users or 2,000 users. The only impact you'll have is on financial side. For 100 users you will pay differently than 10,000 users, so I don't think you have an issue on this side.

All our users have libraries on their computers. So if they have a device from the company, they have Zscaler on it. I think we have about 3,000 users in my company.

We have one or two people on maintenance from the global networking team. You don't need to do something special, it just works. The only thing we need to do is check daily if there are any threats, as well as to verify the US dollar and stuff like that. In terms of maintaining it, doing something to make it work, you don't have to worry about that. It's a cloud provided solution. The only thing that you have to concentrate upon is the business side. You have to see how your business is affected, what type of traffic you have in there, and check security threats on your site. That's it. The product by itself is run by the Zscaler team and they do a good job. We do not have maintenance debts. The only incidence that I remember is last month they were blocking our site or something , but that was solved quickly with support from Zscaler.

I did not get any experience directly, I got some instance of indirect support. I asked networking for something and they work directly with the support. My impression was that they responded quickly, relatively speaking. I don't know exactly how it works on the other side, but my impression indirectly was that they offer quick support.

no cloud solution and we had to route back to office the road warriors trafic 

From what I discussed with my colleagues from the network that we were working with, it wasn't a difficult process. I cannot tell you how long it took.

We didn't have a similar solution. We had a solution, but we didn't have something cloud-based as a security solution, so I would say we did not use any cloud security-based system.

Check if a product like this makes sense for you. And look at the specifics: what you need in terms of security and what features you would like to have in it. Zscaler is one solution. It's a good solution, but it doesn't do everything. First of all, analyze a few solutions and make a demo. Without a demo, I do not recommend moving forward, because any security solution comes with a price. There is also the financial price, to know if that is okay for your company. Usually Zscaler works best for companies that have users that do not stay in an office. They have road warriors. I would recommend it for companies that have a lot of users moving from here to there.

I would rate Zscaler as eight out of ten. It's not an ideal solution, one of the things is that I do not have my IP fully inside it. For example, you have countries where they don't have a lot of presence and then sometimes they go to another country where they have a presence or data center. When you come back to the other country, and you have to open a fiber, it can be geographically restrictive. I find my country and am going through by neighborhood. When I come back to my country, I cannot see it because I'm geographically restricted. I'm not part of that country, so that's one reason Zscaler isn't ideal.

Zscaler Internet Access provides customers with the internet. We can easily integrate policies. 

The solution has reduced cyberattacks.

We can focus on a granular level of things. 

Zscaler Internet Access needs to integrate more ISPs. It is good to have more than three ISPs. 

I have been working with the solution for one and a half years. 

The product is stable. 

Zscaler Internet Access is scalable. 

Zscaler Internet Access has good tech support. 

The tool is moderately priced. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

We use Zscaler for VPN connections and for internet security.

The internet security that it provides is valuable.

The VPN is valuable, as the whole technology is very different from a traditional VPN.

There are a few features that are not compatible with the Azure cloud.

It's not fully compatible with our environment because of the way that it is divided into business units. In order to get it working properly, there are some things that we had to put in for enhancements. Otherwise, everything works well.

We have been using Zscaler Internet Access for about a year.

It is a stable solution, although once or twice, we had issues with latency and slowness. Other than on these occasions, it has been fine.

Scalability-wise, everything is good. We have approximately 3,000 users and we do plan to increase usage. Ultimately, we want to include everyone, which is about 10,000 users.

We have been in contact with technical support and they are very responsive. They also have TAM support, which means that we have a dedicated engineer to look into our issues. That is nice to have.

I have used Cisco Umbrella in the past, which is similar. However, there are definitely differences between these two solutions. Cisco Umbrella is a DNS-based web filtering solution, whereas Zscaler is a cloud-based web application firewall combined with a regular firewall, antivirus, IPS, and other security features.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment took place over a couple of days.

We used Zscaler Professional Services for the deployment.

In summary, this is a good product and I completely recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is for organizations that have a lot of road warriors or very highly distributed small offices. It provides protection anywhere you are...whether you are in a hotel somewhere, or in Africa, it does not matter. You will get the Zscaler protection presence anywhere.

This solution helps you establish a secure connection from your laptop to the closest Zscaler point of presence. So, you have protection anywhere in the world. That's the advantage of it. You don't have to VPN all the way to your home office if you're half-the-world away. You go to the closest Zscaler connection and get your policies applied there. Its very powerful. Its great for anybody who has a lot of distributed work force, a lot of work from home people, or a lot of road warriors, that is where Zscaler shines.

The most valuable feature is the Zscaler protection from external threats. It scrubs everything, email, worms and root problems from websites. It is protection, particularly for distributors users and road warriors. Its very good. They're rated highest in secure web-data wise.

I do not have a problem with the stability of the product.

It is scalable. You can easily put new users and offices on it. It is cloud-based, so you do not run into a hardware limitation like you would with other products.

We used tech support when we first set up the solution. It was good.

It was very straightforward. Anyone with firewall familiarity will find it a simple process to download this solution.

The pricing is an issue. It is expensive if you have all of your users in the same location. It is expensive compared to other firewalls on the market.

We have made comparisons to Palo Alto and Cisco Miraki.

The solution's great, but you have to put it into context because of the pricing and the way it basically protects the device from anywhere. It is really more meant from highly distributed organizations, for organizations that have a lot of work from home and those with road warrior workers. That's what it is designed for.

We are using the solution for internet security. It's mostly web-based filtering.

We are into this modern world, meaning, we are working from home in hybrid scenario. Due to the pandemic, we have seen a lot of shifts towards a hybrid model of work. That provides lots of challenges in terms of security including, how to protect the users' machines and other devices. That is one of the core use cases. Wherever you are, you need to be protected. However, the traditional approaches such as a legacy-based proxy system won't work. 

If we have some kind of critical systems, we need to figure out how we can provide the access to all these users, all these remote or roaming users, access to these critical areas, and we need to eliminate those legacy-based VPNs. Zscaler is doing it best. Zscaler offers the best service since you are protected wherever you are.

The internet access is great. It offers good web filtering. It has DLP features. We can monitor our networks with ease. We can monitor the usage, bandwidth, chop, chalking, all these things we can monitor. On top of that, it is providing advanced threat protection ATP, which means any kind of malicious network or malicious payloads that are going through our network can be detected and it can be blocked. We can have a certain kind of block list. There are multiple levels of features.

We have fewer issues with Zscaler.

In terms of user experience, that is also excellent. 

In terms of reporting to senior management, it gives us a clear picture of what needs to be achieved about that solution.

It is easy to set up the solution. 

The solution is stable.

It is a scalable product. 

In terms of user experience, it could be better. It all depends upon the configuration, though. At the moment, they are one of the best. In terms of room of improvement, it depends upon the specific use cases of the customers.

For example, it might be that some of the users are having some kind of connectivity issue. It depends upon how those users are connected. It may not be a product issue. Or maybe they are using a VPN. Local banks won't allow connectivity to their application over a VPN or over a cloud-based proxy service, for example. In some countries, the local banks restrict these kinds of communications. There needs to be some whitelisting done to get those users connected. 

At the moment, we are trying to onboard that solution. In my previous organization, I have used that solution. In my current organization, we are trying to onboard the solution.

It is a stable solution. I never faced any kind of downtime for my critical services. They have a higher availability. If one of the locations goes down, automatically, it'll scale to a preferred location.

The solution scales very well. 

In the last three or four years, there has been a shift towards this product. We likely will increase usage. 

I've never directly dealt with technical support. My team handles any issues and would deal with them directly.

It is easy to set up. However, you need manpower and you need a team to deliver these kinds of things. It's not a plug-and-play thing. It has lots of configurations. We need to deploy the agents. We need to set up those configurations. If we have multiple offices, we need to understand the routing and what mechanisms are in place. That's why it takes a team.

The length of deployment depends on the company and environment. You're looking at the number of networks, the number of servers. 

I can't speak to the costs. I don't handle the licensing. 

I'm a customer and end-user. 

I'm not sure of the exact version of the solution.

Zscaler is a cloud service provider, so they are hosting their services on their own cloud. They might be using the public cloud. I'm not sure. However, it's not an on-premise solution. It's a cloud-based proxy.

You need to perform that due diligence. You need to understand your use cases, including the number of users and how many are working from home or roaming, et cetera. You need to understand hosting, and how to protect servers. There's a lot of understanding you need to have before you can begin implementing anything.  

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.