Home / Blog / General / 10 reasons why security is moving to the cloud

September 12, 2019

Cloud computing is quickly changing enterprise IT with applications like Salesforce and Office 365, which are improving productivity, reducing costs, and making management more… manageable.

Now, organisations are discovering that those same advantages can be achieved by migrating security to the cloud.

Organisations understand that protecting users with a consistent and enforceable policy requires much more than simple URL or web filtering. Thousands of companies have already switched their IT security from appliances to experience the benefits of the Zscaler Security Cloud.

This blog will tell you why…

Zscaler

1. From point solutions to unified security

Point solutions are no longer effective enough to support distributed environments with many locations and branch offices, neither can they effectively protect telecommuters and remote workers. Zscalers provides the best defence against today’s sophisticated threats including botnets, malicious websites, scripting attacks, and much more.

2. Protect road warriors

Appliance-based solutions are not enough to upkeep with today’s workforce. Employees are now working from airports, coffee shops and anywhere they can find a internet connectivity. It is essential to establish a secure connection with a VPN back to headquarters or to some regional hub where a security appliance is deployed.

This deteriorates the user experience and creates back haul costs which encourages users to access the internet directly which could introduce malware to the network.

With Zscaler, no matter where the worker is, the nearest data center is accessed, policy is enforced, and only then is the Internet accessed with full protection and low latency. The user gets the same policy and the same protection whether sitting at headquarters, in a hotel in London, or in a coffee shop in Chicago.

3. Protect mobile device users

Smartphones and tablets provide users with multiple productivity benefits because they can provide access to corporate services like email or SaaS applications.

These devices typically operate on a 3G or 4G network and go directly to the internet, making them difficult to secure. This traffic does not go through an appliance, and users are often compromised.

With Zscaler, you get the same policy and the same protection whether your users are on a PC, a laptop, a smartphone, or a tablet.

Secure Cloud Transformation

4. Protect your distributed enterprise

Companies of today no longer work out of a single facility. A typical company has multiple offices around the world. A security appliance requires you to either back-haul traffic to headquarters or to a regional hub facility. Either way, you wind up paying twice for bandwidth.

One Zscaler customer is protecting thousands of users at offices all over the world and is saving $1.6 million per month by avoiding back-hauling costs alone.

5. Avoid network latency and improve the user experience

Zscaler provides a rich and fast Internet experience for the user. Avoiding the need to backhaul traffic does more than save money; it improves network performance.

Zscaler can do this because its fundamental innovation lies in its ability to create a large global network that acts as a single virtual proxy, so that any user can go to any gateway at any time for policy-based secure Internet access.

The typical appliance overhead is simply no match.

6. Simplification of IT

No hardware. No software. No clients. No complications. Appliance vendors can’t say that.

By consolidating multiple point products and not having to worry about large-scale deployments in multiple locations, the Zscaler Security Cloud frees valuable IT resources to focus on strategic and architectural challenges, not patching and managing boxes.

Zscaler

7. Get real-time reporting that’s interactive and consolidated

With Zscaler you are not limited to batch reporting. Whether you have 500 employees or 50,000, you can view transaction-level logs for any employee at any location from any destination within seconds.

And, that’s backed by a Zscaler SLA.

Appliance vendors typically require you to buy and maintain reporting servers, and still rely on batch reporting — with no SLA.

8. Best total cost of Ownership (TCO)

With Zscaler, there is no CAPEX. You are not buying and deploying hardware, so deployment costs are minimal. Ongoing management costs are minimal, too.

There are no patches or upgrades to worry about. You enjoy lower bandwidth costs. You get better security and fewer infected devices, meaning less time re-imaging your hardware assets.

9. Integration and consolidation of point products

Today, your DMZ most likely has several point products: a web proxy; a zero-day security product; a DLP appliance and more. Each product requires integration with Active Directory
for user and group policy settings. That carries a burden in terms of actual cost and IT overhead.

With Zscaler, integrated functionality gives you better security, a consistent user interface, and consolidated policy and reporting.

10. Benefit from the largest security cloud in the industry

According to Gartner, Zscaler already has the largest global footprint of data centers among all security vendors. With data centers in over 100 locations around the world, the Zscaler Security Cloud processes over 30 billion requests per day. And blocks more than 100 million threats per day.

Once a threat is detected on the cloud, that threat is blocked for every single user. As a result of the threat-sharing partnerships and their own cloud intelligence gathering, the Zscaler cloud has more than 100,000 security updates per day.

Impressive right?


What is a cyber security improvement programme?

To combat cyber threats, you need the right people, processes and tools to secure your systems and data. All three need to work together for this to work.

Just like a burglar, a hacker looks for an easy way in. Setting up a high-tech home security system is a great step. But if nobody locks the door, you just threw left yourself vulnerable.

Weak passwords are the unlocked window. Phishing is your aunt letting in the gas man who turns out to be a con man. You can reduce risk with a cyber security improvement programme that supports and protects your business – and ensures you are not a soft target for criminals.


Related articles:

Comtact's UK Security Operation Centre (SOC)


About Comtact Ltd.

Comtact Ltd. is a government-approved Cyber Security and IT Managed Service Provider, supporting clients 24/7 from our ISO27001-accredited UK Security Operations Centre (SOC).

Located at the heart of a high security, controlled-access Tier 3 data centre, Comtact’s state-of-the-art UK Cyber Defence Centre (SOC) targets, hunts & disrupts hacker behaviour, as part of a multi-layered security defence, to help secure some of the UK’s leading organisations.