Securing Remote Work
Safeguarding Business Continuity with Zscaler
COVID-19 has changed the way the world does business
CHAPTER 1
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CHAPTER 1
Enterprise challenges with supporting work from anywhere
CHAPTER 2
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CHAPTER 2
In search of (urgent) agility: Cloud architectures for working from anywhere
CHAPTER 3
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CHAPTER 3
How Zscaler delivers productivity and security for a work-from-anywhere workforce
CHAPTER 4
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CHAPTER 4
The rise of the cloud-first modern architecture: How COVID-19 is accelerating digital transformation
CHAPTER 5
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CHAPTER 5
Lessons learned: CIO Journeys
CHAPTER 6
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CHAPTER 6
Foreword
These are unpredictable and unsettling times. Like all of you, I am watching events unfold in the global response to COVID-19, and I am doing what is best for my family, the Zscaler family, and Zscaler customers and partners. Zscaler’s mission is to provide secure, fast, and reliable access to applications, no matter where they are hosted, and no matter where users connect. Zscaler is playing a pivotal role for enterprises as they respond to the crisis: We have an obligation to help customers keep employees safe and productive as they work remotely.
We’ve all been talking about remote work for years, but now most organizations find themselves immediately forced into it. How exactly do you follow social-distancing mandates in a global, interconnected organization without losing productivity or exposing the business to unnecessary risk? This is a central question today for the entire C-suite.
The stark truth is that employees will do whatever is easiest to get the information they need to get their jobs done, even bypassing slow VPNs to connect directly to resources. This greatly increases risk. It’s hard to blame the employees: They simply want to turn on their computer or mobile device and go to work. Most of them will just go directly to the internet to access cloud applications like Salesforce, AWS, and others for their day-to-day work.
Like so many of you, the Zscaler staff is working remotely now too. We all use the Zscaler cloud platform to enable our teams to deliver the same level of productivity regardless of where they work, what device they’re using, or what business applications they need.
In recent months, as COVID-19 has spread, enterprises have reached out to us to help them achieve this same level of productivity by providing access to all internal and external applications as quickly as possible.
Many enterprises have put business-continuity plans in place, but few plans (or planners) could have anticipated COVID-19’s far-reaching impact, in particular, the urgent shift to a 100-percent remote workforce.
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When asking employees to work remotely, organizations have to take many things into consideration to keep employees secure and productive: Will all employees be able to access all applications remotely? Can the IT team provide support remotely? What’s the impact on your organization’s security posture? What will user performance look like?
When remote-work enablement is done right, employee teams are able to:
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Access all authorized applications, whether they are SaaS apps like Salesforce, collaboration tools like Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), or internal apps.
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Securely surf the internet.
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Deliver IT support from any location on any device.
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Lessen bandwidth use to cut costs and improve employees’ overall user experience.
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Do all of this while improving overall security by minimizing the attack surface.