Zscaler Internet Access Reviews

The solution is primarily used as a secure web gateway.

Overall, it's a good solution. 

We had very few issues during implementation.

Technical support is quite helpful and responsive once you get a hold of them. 

It has private access and has a lot of features inbuilt including DLP, CASB, et cetera. 

The solution is scalable and stable. 

The solution can be a bit pricey.

Sometimes, support isn't available. 

Zscaler does not have any local data centers. For example, if we have our customers in Czech Republic, in the Czech Republic they don't have their data center, as the local content, in the Czech language. They should do something in the Czech Republic and ensure that the language is accessible. They should have one data center as these people want to see the local content. Everyone wants to see their first language in the available content.

Also, in Brazil, they just have two data centers in São Paulo and they should consider expanding to other data centers.

When you check the logs, you cannot see what policy is allowed. That is one thing that is lacking. If I put someone's account in Zscaler, then it should show which policy it will be applicable for. For example, in Forcepoint we have that feature. This is something that Zscaler needs to add. They just need to put the account of some users and check whether they will be able to access that or not.

They don't have MFA, or multi-factor authentication, for admins.

I've used the solution for about one year and three or four months. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is very scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's on the cloud, which makes scaling easy.

The support is great. They helped us during implementation. 

When we ask for support, however, they reschedule the calls. Support guys are not always available. If I schedule the call for three to four days before, they will reschedule it. Sometimes, we'll join the call and they won't and then they'll just reschedule. That is something that has been disappointing. 

The implementation process was pretty straightforward. We did not run into issues. 

We did have some issues in that there were professional services that were purchased already, however, we came to know very late that we had any professional services support available from the vendor. We ended up handling things ourselves. The professional services were okay, however, they just were able to help us at a high level with recommendations.

The product is a bit expensive. That said, that is not in our scope to worry about pricing. 

We were integrated with Azure Identity. We are not sure if the client has their own data center or what they are using in that backend, or which cloud provider.

I would rate the solution a nine 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.

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 this web security solution to protect our users in remote locations or branches from internet threats. It is very important for our organization to protect our users, even if they are not connected to our network. 

Zscaler Web Security protects our users in remote locations from internet threats even if they are not connected to our network.

What I like most about Zscaler Web Security is that we can have our users protected from internet threats and viruses even when they're not connected to our network. I love the fact that it enables us to create whitelists and blacklists based on specific users. These features are extremely important to us and that is what we like most about this solution.

The reporting could be improved to make it a little bit easier. When it comes to individual users, I'd like to see easy reporting that can be shared with executives. Due to my technical background I don't have issues to understand the reporting. 

However, if I have to give a report to an executive to read, he may find it too confusing. He wants to see something simplistic that contains information like what the user's access time was, how long the user spent time on the site, which sites was visited, what they did etc. The current reports can, therefore, be somewhat improved and simplified. 

Another thing that I would like to see is if Zscaler could have a separate product for direct access. I looked at a private access solution, but I understand there's a separate product that isn't integrated with this. 

We've never experienced any outages or other problems since we started using this solution, so I believe it is very stable and secure. 

I think it scaled quite well. We are currently using it in a small organization with about 250 users, and I would say it will scale as our company grows. 

We've used the technical support on occasion, and they were excellent. 

We bought Zscaler Web Security through our Internet Service Provider, so they handled most of the setup. So, from our part, it was quite straightforward.

Our Internet Service Provider is a reseller, and they helped with the installation and setup. Their level of expertise was outstanding. Maintenance and deployment will be easy to manage and I believe one person will be able to handle it. It won't be a full-time job. 

Although I can't put a figure to it, we've definitely seen a return on our investment.

Our monthly fee is around R3000 and I think it is very reasonable.

My advice to other users would be to determine if the reporting meets their requirements. They should get their whitelists, blacklists, groups and active directory set up properly before trying to implement it because it has a very strong integration with the active directory. Therefore, if you have your active directory well set up, you can classify your users and create groups as to who can go where and who can do what on the internet.

If I have to rate this product, I will give it a nine out of ten - simply because I never give anything a ten.

The use cases of the solution are vast. CASB is a part of the product.

The solution has policies that work on client connectors. It’s pretty decent.

SSL inspection is a valuable feature.

The tool should improve the predefined dictionaries. The product should focus on improving its current features. They are good, but they need a lot of polishing.

I have been using the solution for almost a year. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten.

The scalability of the tool is pretty good. I rate the scalability a nine and a half or ten out of ten.

The product must improve its support.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. The solution is deployed on the cloud.

I see an ROI on the product.

The pricing is decent, but it is not that low. If we need any extra features, the price will increase.

People wanting to use the solution must not rely much on predefined dictionaries. I would recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I use Zscaler Internet Access as an internet proxy for security.

The most valuable feature of Zscaler Internet Access is that it is a consolidated solution, it comes with many features, such as DLP.

Zscaler Internet Access could improve by adding a VPN feature.

I have been using Zscaler Internet Access for approximately one year.

Zscaler Internet Access is highly stable.

The scalability of Zscaler Internet Access is good.

The technical support from Zscaler Internet Access is good.

I rate the support from Zscaler Internet Access a four out of five.

The initial setup of Zscaler Internet Access is simple.

We did evaluate other solutions before choosing Zscaler Internet Access, such as Symantec.

I rate Zscaler Internet Access an eight out of ten. 

The protection is most valuable.

The interface for administration could be better. They should upgrade the management portal.

Their support could also be better.

We have probably been using this solution for about three years. We are using its latest version. 

Its stability is reasonable. We've had a couple of outages, but overall, it has been okay.

Its scalability is fine.

It could be better.

It was probably in the middle in terms of complexity. Bits of it were easy, and bits of it were more complicated than we envisaged. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of the setup.

Its implementation probably took several weeks. It is deployed on-premises as well as on a public cloud.

We had involved a third party. It was a bit of a mix.

For the maintenance, there are about three people.

It is quite expensive. It does its job, but it is quite expensive for what we need.

Understand your use case and be sure of your technical ability to implement the policies.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

The primary use for the solution is to provide better more mature security for our client's networks.

The solution offers a level of quality of operation and services for each site. By deploying this service we reduce the overall variational risk.

The solution offers a distributed organization to master and to control all of the endpoints. Zscaler allows us to deploy their solution instead of building an in-house proprietary solution. Because it is well integrated and mature, it's faster, cheaper, and better for the company.

Zscaler should provide adjacent services, which would be complementary to their current offering that could to be more pragmatic for a customer. For example, if you take Akamai, you get multiple sets of services, all depending on the customer and the strategy and the complexity and the problems. In some areas, they are more varied in terms of coverage. For example, they also offer content delivery networks, which is complimentary, and for some customers that could solve two problems at once. By providing a wider range of services, Zscaler could reduce deployment risk and operational risk by being a one-stop-shop type of solution.

In the next release, Zscaler should offer a content delivery network.

The solution is scalable. Right now, the company has 40,000 users. The client intends to increase usage.

The initial setup that I'm aware of was not very smooth. I would not blame the product. It was more of the global maturity of the organization we were implementing for. If the organization is not able to align their team, the deployment will be difficult. This deployment is ongoing. We started it four months ago.

We consult on the implementation.

I'm currently consulting clients, and have worked with this solution extensively in the past. Most of my clients are moving from a private cloud to a hybrid cloud deployment model.

The way Zscaler has shaped their product is very good. Now they need to expand the coverage and to have a more global service. For mid-players and sometimes top-players, multiplying the numbers of providers to build an integrated solution is a complex endeavor. If Zscaler expanded their services, that would remove some complexity,

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.