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Zscaler Earnings Review
Brad Freeman
May 29, 2025
In case you missed it from this earnings season:
Table of Contents
a. Zscaler 101
Zscaler is a large player in network security. It competes with Palo Alto’s next-gen suite, Cloudflare and many others. Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange (ZTE) is its overarching, cloud-native security platform. It blazes a trail between users, apps and devices across eligible networks, while securing data at rest and in motion. Zero Trust is exactly what it sounds like: never trusting a device or end user. The exchange vets and verifies all traffic as it moves within a company’s perimeter. It doesn’t allow bad actors to breach infrastructure weak spots and gain free access to everything else thereafter. That’s called “lateral threat movement.” It never trusts (as the name indicates) and constantly verifies. Zscaler uses risk scores to assess needed levels of security for requests. That makes sure it’s only creating user friction when there’s actual security concern. This Zero Trust approach routinely cuts infrastructure costs for customers by shrinking the attack surface down to grant more granular permission.
ZTE replaces an antiquated firewall and virtual private network (VPN) setup in which fixed rules determine entry into the firewall-protected environment. Once that entry is granted, every device & user within a perimeter gets perpetual and unconditional access. I think it’s clear to see how that could be more problematic than ZTE’s approach.
Zscaler Network Security Products:
Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) protects internet connections. It’s the middleman between a user and a network that ensures proper authorization & access.
ZIA routinely displaces legacy secure web gateways (SWGs) and firewalls.
Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) offers remote access to internal apps. This upgrades VPN utility by “connecting directly to required resources without public exposure,” per Zscaler filings.
Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) ensures high quality and always-on performance of cloud apps. It sifts through networks to identify sources holding back productivity to be fixed.
This includes application performance monitoring, some endpoint monitoring tools and more.
Zscaler for Users is the firm’s bundle that combines ZIA, ZPA and ZDX.
For newer network products, Zero Trust Segmentation localizes and separates networks. This treats individual stores/factories/buildings as secure islands to prevent open sharing across locations. Branch security treats every single company location as its own Island or network to shrink the attack surface. These “islands” are connected only when needed. Both branch security and segmentation work very closely together to lower the risk of lateral threat movement.
Key Zscaler Network Performance Products:
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): Allows software to be accessed on remote devices. ZTE ensures this is done safely and securely.
Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-Wan): Digital manager of network connectivity. It splits network hardware and software-based control. This cuts hardware and network costs, streamlines management & augments protection. This replaces Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).
ZS’s SD-Wan offering is zero trust-based.
Software-based management paired with Zscaler’s Zero Trust approach allows for seamless connection to remote branches, contractors and data centers.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): These are subsections of public cloud environments. They offer users more autonomy with their network and apps. They also allow for secure connections between cloud and self-hosted (on-premise) environments with no public network exposure. This is especially key for highly regulated industries.
Network Security + Network Performance:
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) provides an overarching, bundled suite of network security and performance tools. Secure Service Edge (SSE) is the security component of SASE.
Security Operations (SecOps) & IT Operations (ITOps) Products:
Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM). This offers a birds-eye view to tag, assess and remediate vulnerabilities across all cloud environments and assets. It ranks all issues, prioritizes pressing items and offers the best course of action for remediation.
Part of SecOps
Risk360 flags vulnerabilities and offers end-to-end risk quantification with intuitive next steps for remediation.
Part of SecOps
Business Insights: Broad visibility into app usage, costs, needs and engagement. This helps minimize unneeded apps and licenses.
Part of SecOps
ZDX Copilot is its GenAI assistant designed to detect and resolve network performance issues on its own.
Part of ITOps.
Pure Cloud Security Offerings (could call most of its product suite “cloud security”):
Zscaler also offers configuration analysis and cloud workload protection products.
Key Zscaler Data Products:
Data security posture management (DSPM) granularly tags, organizes and protects cloud-native data.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) guards clients against data leakage or theft. This works for email, cloud, web, endpoints and more.
Data Fabric for security is how Zscaler collects and combines needed context from 1st and 3rd party sources. This improves overarching security visibility to ensure proper hygiene, strong risk management and timely remediation.
Its unified suite of data products is called Zscaler Data Everywhere.
Zscaler offers data security across endpoints, email, web, GenAI apps, legacy software and so much more. This is an important newer company priority. If it’s already protecting so much of the world’s network traffic… and if it already collects and leverages all of this data (structured and unstructured) in its massive, scalable security data lake… that gives it a head start on using this lucrative insight to offer more products.
Tying it all together:
Zero Trust Everywhere is the latest and greatest iteration and branding of its Zero Trust Exchange. It includes all products within ZScaler for Users, all cloud security offerings and the Zero Trust Branch product. It features a communicative focus on holistic, complete coverage. Like Palo Alto with “Platformization,” as well as CrowdStrike and most cybersecurity firms in various parts of the sector, Zscaler is reorganizing its offering to drive easier platform-level adoption. In turn, that means better data sharing, better outcomes, lower costs and loyal customers more reliant on your bundle.
b. A Quick Reminder & Key Points
Prices will be going up this summer for new subscribers. Not for existing subscribers. The decision has been made. As part of this, we are making large investments in the website and product improvements to keep the price-to-value ratio best-in-class. Stay tuned. You can lock in your lower rate below.
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