Zscaler is a comprehensive suite of security services delivered from the cloud. It covers email, web and mobile computing. Some services the product provides are anti-malware, browser and application vulnerability management, policy enforcement for mobile computing, bandwidth and QoS management, web filtering, intellectual property protection and regulatory compliance.
Zscaler boasts the world's largest security cloud and it is, indeed, accessible from just about anywhere on the planet. Zscaler works on the basis of distributed data centers. The localized data center is where the customer's policies reside, but in seconds that data center can push the policies out to the other data centers around the world. This helps ensure that users in remote locations stay as current as the users accessing through the nearby data center. This provides what Zscaler calls shadow policy. This follows the user, and because it is relatively local, no matter where the user is in the world there is little latency in receiving the policy and applying it.
The nearness of the data center to the user globally also reduces latency that the user would experience if they had to access the cloud and then, over the cloud, access the data center back home. For road warriors, this can provide a big benefit.
One thing that particularly impressed us was the simplicity of the user interface. It is all in a single console, but that is not as impressive as the simple visualization scheme the product uses to convey information that can otherwise become somewhat confusing. Administration is clean and the information the administrator needs to create, modify and push out policies is easily at hand.
Reporting is comprehensive and can be delivered in near real time, meaning that it is completely up to date with users' activities. We liked that the Zscaler services move with the user, no matter where in the world the user happens to be. This by itself is a big benefit. Finally, we liked that Zscaler is constantly gathering global threat data that it uses in protecting customers' data.
