Zscaler has unveiled Zscaler Resilience, incorporating a new set of capabilities that extend the resilience of Zscaler’s architecture and operations and maintain interconnections between users and devices to critical cloud-based applications.
Building upon 15 years of SaaS security, these SSE capabilities enable customers to prepare for and recover from black swan events that could otherwise disrupt or stop business operations.
Catastrophic events caused by nation-state actors, acts of vandalism, and natural disasters are difficult or impossible to predict. While these debilitating occurrences are not commonplace, the stakes for cloud resilience continue to rise.
Amplified by the fact that modern enterprises have highly mobile employees that rely on secure access to critical cloud-based applications, these events can cause massive disruptions, loss of sensitive data, and impact revenue and reputation.
To help organizations prepare for black swan events, Zscaler Resilience leverages the integrated services in the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange cloud security platform to deliver business continuity capabilities that enable customers worldwide to continue their normal operations.
Resilience to the cloud: Preserving interconnections to public and private cloud applications
Zscaler Resilience provides business continuity capabilities to protect organizations across blackouts, brownouts, and even rare black swan failure events with the ability to automatically find the optimal path from user and device to application.
Zscaler Resilience now includes the following new capabilities:
- Disaster recovery – During a catastrophic event affecting access to private applications behind the Zscaler cloud, these customer-controlled operations provide IT and SecOps teams the added flexibility to securely bypass the affected Zscaler cloud and connect to a Zscaler Private Service Edge residing in the customer’s local data center or in a public cloud where the most updated security policies are still applied without disrupting the business. Direct internet access can be restricted to only critical business apps with localized content filtering leveraging Zscaler Client Connector to ensure business continuity.
- Dynamic performance-based selection – This feature allows customers to recover from brownout scenarios that can cause performance degradation between users and applications by continuously probing the gateways for HTTP latency and autonomously establishing tunnels that choose the optimal path for traffic.
- Customer-controlled data center exclusion – This enables customers to set a temporary exclusion period for one of the data centers experiencing connectivity issues and automatically regain services once the issue is resolved.
Complementing these new capabilities, Zscaler Resilience Audit is a new customized service that assists customers in preparing business continuity plans by identifying areas for improvement and closing gaps before unforeseen events can cause disruptions.
As an early adopter of Zscaler Resilience, Euro French global energy and services company needed to maintain ongoing critical infrastructure for its renewable energy and low carbon distributed energy infrastructures in order to help its clients achieve their decarbonization targets in more than 30 countries.
To provide services to individual households, cities, and communities, as well as industries, uninterrupted uptime of their assets is essential. By leveraging the new Zscaler Resilience capabilities as an extension of their Zscaler Private Access, the energy company can control access to applications whether the user is in the office or in any remote location, allowing for uninterrupted services to predefined applications, virtually eliminating downtime, and ensuring user productivity.
The extended functionality of Zscaler Private Access allows the energy company’s call centers to provide subscriptions and support to customers around the clock even in the case of an unexpected event.
For an uninterrupted sales process, staff need to access data stored in different locations without downtime. Zscaler Resilience leverages existing architectural components of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform such as the client connector, app connector, and private service edge—used for universal ZTNA—to make the switch to disaster recovery mode seamless in the case of an emergency.
“As enterprise environments have become more distributed and cloud-centric, executives have begun to prioritize resilience to ensure business continuity,”said John Grady, Principal Analyst, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
“By integrating Zscaler Resilience directly into its Zero Trust Exchange platform, Zscaler is helping customers prepare for, and quickly recover from, blackouts, brownouts, and black swan events that could otherwise disrupt or stop business operations, in a straightforward and cost-effective way,” Grady continued.