Zscaler, a beacon of reliability.

In our recent announcement, we highlighted Zscaler’s continual growth as we welcome an increasing number of customers looking for a dependable security cloud that ensures both protection and an exceptional user experience. Achieving 500 billion daily transactions represents a significant milestone, made possible by the trust placed in us by our clients.

That trust is hard-earned, and rightfully so, since Zscaler operates as a pivotal security cloud between users, devices, and applications, making us essential to our clients’ operations. The reliability and efficiency of our service are of utmost importance, which is why we strive diligently to meet the demands for service availability and capacity.

Our efforts are paying off! As the volume of daily transactions has climbed over the past few years, we have noticed a corresponding decrease in the number of support requests handled by our customer success team.

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Emphasizing Business Continuity

The significance of business continuity planning (BCP) has surged in 2024, largely due to an increase in governmental and industry regulations that necessitate it, including DORA. Additionally, a series of high-profile IT failures that affected numerous organizations globally have contributed to this urgency. As businesses increasingly depend on secure and continuous operations, it is crucial for vendors to ensure they offer dependable services while adhering to regulatory requirements.

Clients, particularly those in regulated sectors, frequently inquire, “We have confidence in Zscaler and your commitment to developing a trusted security cloud, but how can we prepare for an unforeseen event, no matter how improbable it seems?”

In the beginning of 2023, Zscaler unveiled resilience features for its security cloud, offering businesses a means to maintain connectivity during major internet disruptions or significant attacks on the infrastructure that supports Zscaler’s services.

These customer-driven resilience solutions have become essential for ensuring continued operations. It’s now time to elevate our offering, and we are excited to announce substantial improvements to our resilience solutions that reduce interruptions to regular operations, even in the face of severe, unpredictable events.

We established three objectives to guide the enhancement of our initial resilience capabilities:

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Introducing Business Continuity Private Clouds

As we advance in our resilience strategy, we are excited to unveil Private Business Continuity Clouds. These clouds will integrate a private control plane with our current private data plane, ensuring seamless access to applications while maintaining a robust security posture, particularly when the public cloud is unavailable. Clients will have the flexibility to set up local services within their own data centers or choose a forthcoming solution managed entirely by Zscaler. It’s essential to understand that the components required vary for internet and SaaS applications compared to private applications, so let’s delve into this further.

Internet and SaaS Applications (ZIA)

In situations where web access and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are crucial, customers aiming to maintain detailed control during a catastrophic event can implement one or more Private Service Edges. These are managed by Zscaler Cloud Operations and consist of either physical or virtual appliances that provide functionality similar to that of Zscaler’s Public Service Edges. These Public Service Edges serve as internet gateways to the Zero Trust Exchange, which hosts over 160 locations globally. The primary responsibilities of a Service Edge include comprehensive web traffic inspection for malware and upholding policies related to malware protection, security, compliance, data loss prevention, and firewall measures.

Enhancements to the Private Service Edge feature the capability for Client Connector to switch over to the Private Service Edge, enabling the establishment of a Z-Tunnel 1.0 using the Business Continuity PAC file. A new feature called Private Policy Caching has been introduced, allowing for smooth transitions between the Private Service Edge and Public Service Edges, by offering a backup for the public Central Authority servers. These servers are instrumental in hosting all customer policies and configuration settings, overseeing the cloud, and providing updates for software and databases, along with threat intelligence.

Thanks to the introduction of the Private Policy Cache, customers can maintain a complete security posture even during catastrophic failures, including for users who are not authenticated but require access during such events.

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Private Applications (ZPA)

Private applications are designed to be accessed in a way that keeps them hidden from everyone except those granted permission. This contrasts with publicly available SaaS applications, which must be exposed to the internet for users to find and use them. This distinction creates distinct challenges, particularly when facing catastrophic failures.

Zscaler has developed a solution to this issue in the form of a new Private Cloud Controller, which is a virtual appliance that remains synchronized with the public Zero Trust Exchange until a failover situation arises, or if the Zero Trust Exchange becomes inaccessible for any reason. This approach was initially created to meet the rigorous demands of the military’s DDIL (Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited) use case, where federal agencies require secure access to critical applications, even during a loss of connection to the public cloud. In such scenarios, the Private Cloud Controller assumes a variety of responsibilities that extend beyond previous capabilities:

Ensuring Business Continuity for Endpoints

It is crucial to consider another significant scenario. Picture a situation where an organization’s endpoints—such as laptops and mobile devices—have been compromised. A notable example of this occurred with Maersk in 2017. Despite the Zscaler public cloud being fully operational and accessible, the organization could face severe challenges if there is no secure method to connect their productivity devices to essential applications.

This is where Cloud Browser Isolation comes into play, providing a secure and agentless way for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) access to web applications. This capability is already part of the Zscaler offering, serving as an alternative to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and ensuring the safe use of BYOD devices. Such features are particularly valuable during a crisis, as they allow affected organizations to use any unmanaged or BYOD device to access applications through a browser. Employees can seamlessly transition from their non-operational corporate devices to continue their tasks. Zscaler can stream applications directly as pixels to the guest device, ensuring that security measures and policies remain intact, while also preventing data loss.

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Conclusion

In the realm of technology, it is inevitable that challenges will arise. IT professionals globally dedicate a significant portion of their efforts to minimize potential disruptions to productivity by enhancing resilience in various forms. This approach acts like an insurance policy; however, in the context of business continuity planning and cybersecurity, it encompasses more than just protection: it often involves adherence to regulatory and compliance mandates across numerous sectors.

These obligations have prompted customers to seek greater capabilities, even during severe crises. With the introduction of these innovative offerings from Zscaler, organizations can trust that their operations will face minimal disruption. For further insights, please refer to our solution brief or view our on-demand webinar.

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