Leading organizations are moving toward local Internet breakouts to ensure a fast user experience and realize the full agility and cost-saving benefits of the cloud. With more traffic bound for the Internet, it is essential to prioritize critical business apps, like Office 365, over YouTube, Spotify, non-critical business traffic and other activities, such as live-streaming sports You could deploy next-generation firewalls or UTM appliances in each location to route traffic locally and police bandwidth, but that approach creates costly, unmanageable appliance sprawl. User experience also suffers with an appliance-based approach, because appliances are not designed for window shaping, and will drop packets and interrupt video streaming during periods of contention.
With the majority of your users and applications in the cloud, and most of your traffic now bound for the Internet, it makes sense to move your security and controls to the cloud, too. By implementing Zscaler Cloud Firewall and Bandwidth Control, both part of the Zscaler Cloud Security Platform — you can route traffic locally to the Internet, providing the same level of protection for all users, across all locations, and enforce bandwidth management policies without deploying any hardware or software.
Create and immediately implement granular policy
Typical bandwidth policies include limiting recreational traffic, such as streaming video, and
giving business apps precedence over other traffic. With Zscaler, there are many more parameters you
can use to define a policy. Here are a few examples:
Office 365 now prevails, not YouTube
Before Zscaler, YouTube accounted for this customer’s largest consumption of bandwidth. With
easy-to-use Zscaler bandwidth controls, the company was able to reserve 40 percent of its bandwidth
specifically for Office 365, while capping YouTube, as shown in this bandwidth report.