Global cloud security solutions provider Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) has released its new Workload Communications solution, which is part of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. It extends Zero Trust security to workloads and applications hosted in public clouds.
Zscaler’s cloud-native technology would reduce attack surfaces, prevent lateral threat transfer, avoid workload compromise, and prevent data loss. It would also assist IT teams in simplifying multi-cloud workload connection by moving away from traditional IP-based routing and VPNs across cloud environments, allowing organizations to accelerate their cloud transformation programs.
Zscaler has extended its Zero Trust Exchange to provide Zero Trust for cloud workloads and help secure cloud-to-internet, cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-data-center, and intra-cloud communications. Traffic is directed to the Zscaler platform, which acts as an intelligent switchboard, where connections are brokered utilizing business policies based on identity and context to link workloads directly to other workloads without requiring access to the corporate network.
By making workloads invisible to the Internet, Zscaler’s strategy would help reduce the attack surface, simplify application connection by removing networking bottlenecks, and offer greater application performance by lowering app-to-app latency. Zscaler, in collaboration with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), provides a network-agnostic Zero Trust fabric to protect cloud workloads and expedite cloud migration.
“To properly secure cloud workloads, three critical areas – security, connectivity, and performance – need to be addressed, which legacy approaches have not been able to solve,” said Amit Sinha, President ad Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Zscaler. “Zscaler has solved all three challenges with a new architecture that extends our Zero Trust Exchange, already trusted by thousands of enterprises to secure millions of users, to cloud workloads for stronger security, simpler connectivity, and better performance. Zscaler’s new architecture eliminates the need for organizations to extend their corporate network to the cloud, which results in a bigger attack surface, operational complexity and performance bottlenecks.”
Multi-Cloud Use Cases
Workload Communications, which is now generally available, extends the capabilities of the Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) services to cloud workloads, allowing enterprises to secure all workload communications over any network, including Internet, direct connect, express route, and others. Zscaler’s technologies would enable clients to achieve the following use cases:
- Application-to-Internet Communications – Cloud Applications require Internet connection for a variety of purposes, including interfacing with third-party Application Programming Interface (API) services and getting software updates. Internet access can be safeguarded with Zero Trust Exchange policies that now incorporate DLP and threat protection while keeping workloads fully invisible to possible cyberthreats.
- Multi-Cloud Application-to-Application Communications – Organizations may use multi-cloud networking to ensure communication across diverse cloud systems. ZPA regulations protect workload communications between cloud providers, regions, and virtual private clouds (VPCs) inside the same public cloud, allowing for smooth and secured application communication without the complexity and performance bottlenecks that outdated technologies might impose.
- Intra-Cloud Application-to-Application Communications – Zscaler employs a mix of macro and micro-segmentation to authenticate software identification within a cloud, VPC/VNet, or data center to enable secure workload-to-workload connections. This involves microsegmenting business-critical settings to avoid unwanted application communication.
“While we share the responsibility of cloud security with our enterprise customers, we are customer obsessed in helping our customers accelerate secure workload migration to AWS to achieve scalability and agility,” said Mona Chadha, Director of Category Management, AWS. “Zscaler provides customers with a Zero Trust security model that simplifies cloud networking and security while eliminating the need for virtual firewalls and mesh or site-to-site networks. Having Zscaler solutions available in AWS Marketplace allows customers to easily subscribe, accelerate time to market while meeting compliance and security requirements.”
