The challenge of bandwidth control in a cloud world

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.

UTM/Firewall Appliance Sprawl

Appliance sprawl results in high costs and complexity — lots of boxes to deploy and manage
Performance degradation leads to the need for hardware upgrades
Bandwidth policing drops packets and negatively impacts user experience
UTM/FW not designed for bandwidth shaping

Zscaler simplifies bandwidth control by moving it to the cloud

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.

Break free with Zscaler

Improve security and performance without the need to purchase, deploy, or manage hardware or software
Provide fast and secure access to the Internet for all users
Prioritize mission-critical business apps over non-essential business apps, personal apps, and web surfing during periods of contention
Reduce MPLS costs by offloading traffic via local Internet breakouts

The Zscaler difference

Prioritize business applications

Limit the impact of streaming media, file sharing, and social media on business apps
Identify bandwidth constraints before they impede the user experience
Align policies for all users to business needs, with granular rules by application class, location, and time

Better user experience

Break out traffic locally for faster Internet access
Enable secure access to both business and personal applications
Leverage window shaping and bandwidth throttling to avoid packet dropping and create a seamless user experience

Reduce costs and simplify IT

Eliminate the need to purchase, deploy, and manage new hardware and software
Reduce MPLS backhaul costs by offloading Internet traffic
Eliminate bottlenecks and WAN latency by enforcing policies in the cloud
Maintain unmatched security in all locations

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Tailor bandwidth policies to align to business needs

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:

Gain detailed bandwidth visibility

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.