Zscaler Internet Access Reviews

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 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.

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. 

Our client is a government client with many different work groups. 

Overall, we're very happy with our product.

The price of the solution could be improved. 

We have been using the solution for two years, since the start of COVID. 

We have had no concerns with the solution's stability so far.

The solution is scalable, we have around 70,000 total users across various environments.

They've been very good, though as we are still assessing the solution you would expect them to be very good.

We also use Cisco Umbrella and we tend to use that more. 

The initial setup wasn't easy in our case, as we have thousands of users spread across different environments. Due to our extensive requirements, initial setup is never going to be easy.

We have found the solution to be expensive. 

We use other similar products and find them to be a bit more preferable to Zscaler. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is to secure internet traffic. Users want to make sure that the site doesn't have DDoS attacks or any malware. Zscaler is able to protect data for individual organizations and for the country as well.

Basically, the standard traditional model of a firewall becomes obsolete when you implement Zscaler. It goes into the secure web gateway, and it removes the hardware requirement and the annual recurring costs and the annual maintenance costs for clients, which is quite important and beneficial for smaller SMB organizations.

The best thing about Zscaler Internet Access is the website filtering. In the UAE it's quite an important feature because most of the malware comes through the SQL injection and through downloads from websites. Zscaler helps protect against that. It is very important for a telco provider, so that their customers, who rent or who buy those services from them, do not have an issue.

In terms of usage, here in the GCC, it's still growing a growing market, so the combination of DLP, data leak prevention, to a certain extent is fine. But what it requires is user-based access or role-based access. The solution needs to grow into that, which definitely takes time. There's not an easy way to integrate it when you have a cloud-based solution.

The only DLP you can have is for the web, such as iboss. The DLP part is quite crucial for this particular region.

DLP, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and some algorithms can be built into the solution. There are certain pet algorithms for AI and machine learning which everybody is moving towards, so that needs to be added to the solution as well.

We haven't had any issues or any complaints from the customer in regards to the stability of the solution. Usually, the stability depends on the end-user as well, for example, how much usage or how much they know about the technology or the product. 

For Zscaler, it is scalable for anywhere from five users up to 5,000 or 10,000 users, because of the MSS model when at telco providers. For an individual company, it is still quite easy for them to scale, based on how much hardware or cloud services they want to deploy. It's pretty easy to scale, as the organization scales.

In general, if you want to look at the number of users, this solution can deploy anywhere from five users up to 10,000 users quite easily from an MSS model, managed services model. When you talk about an on-prem model, however, scaling needs to be deployed at phases. It cannot be deployed in one go for anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 users. It has to go through a deployment phase.

We don't have experience with the vendor's technical support, as we offer our own. 

There are three levels of technical support that we provide. The first level comes when we charge the customers on the technical support if our engineer needs to go on-site and help. 

The second level of support is, if it's an MSS program, through the telco provider. 

If they still need help, then it has to go to the vendor. We always try to help our clients first instead of directing them to vendors.

If you go for the MSS model, managed services model, then the initial setup is very straightforward. You register with the telco and the services are switched on. When you want to stop paying for that, you just turn the services off. That's how simple it is.

If you go for an on-prem model, there are going to be certain challenges surrounding how it needs to be deployed. It's dependant on the client. If the client is a cloud-native organization, it becomes easier. But if the client, SMB client or enterprise client, is not cloud-native, then it is a little expensive for them.

If all the prerequisites are met and the hardware requirements are met for an on-premises model, it takes about a week to deploy the solution. That would be for a small scale organization of about 300 users.

If it is an MSS, you can expect it to take one week. That's only if all the prerequisites are met. If the prerequisites are not ready, it can take up to three to four months. It also depends on the client and how they are looking to deploy it. If they want to go phase by phase or they want to do a full-time deployment, for example.

We are consultants. We handle the implementation ourselves.

The return on investment usually comes in anywhere between three to six months, for a large enterprise. For an SMB, it usually is apparent after two to three months.

Pricing varies from customer to customer, depending on the hardware that is required and the deployment model.

Our clients might evaluate other options, like iboss and Fortinet. We offer Zscaler.

With MSS service providers, they prefer to have an on-prem OPEX-based deployment model. Like telecom providers or data center service providers, they buy the service and roll it out to customers or sell it to their own customers for a monthly fee. We have a mix of clients who prefer to have private clouds and hybrid models.

There is competition, with, for example, iboss and Fortinet in the region. iboss is hardware-free but the company is young and still growing. It's not there yet. Zscaler, however, the way they have matured the market and have become a mature model, makes them preferred over other vendors or other brands.

In terms of implementing Zscaler, it's quite straightforward, but even having a straightforward technology like Zscaler requires a consultative approach of which are the critical areas where the service needs to be deployed first. That needs to be studied as per the cybersecurity guidelines so that the right protocols are implemented.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten. 

They still have some features to integrate. The solution is still evolving.

We primarily use the product for proxy services. We are using that to manage services with a third party, so we are not directly exposed to Zscaler.

We enjoy all of the proxy capabilities and the capability to integrate into the SIEM/SOC solution. We also like the capability to have local agents on PCs.

We are using that in managed services, so we are happy with the managed service as it is.

It's a very complete solution and well-organized. 

Sometimes it's not easy to use during large deployments of workstations. It's a bottleneck from a network point of view.

It's a technical solution, so you need to have good architects knowledgeable on Zscaler.

We don't need any other added features.

I've been using the product for nearly two years. 

We have around 1,000 users on the solution. 

We do not have plans to increase usage. 

We have other products as well. In the current set of products, I'm not forcing any swaps or changes.

It's a managed service. We are not exposed to the initial setup process.

It's a managed service, so it's included in the service.

We don't have a direct relationship with Zscaler as we use it in a managed service. 

I'd advise new users to be sure that they have good architects to integrate. It's quite complicated.

Sometimes the complexity of integrating with legacy and other complex setups is a chore.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.