ZSCALER’S ADVANTAGES OVER BLUE COAT WHITE PAPER
Enterprise-class scalability
When it comes to web security scalability, there
is Zscaler and then there is “everyone else.”
Honestly, there isn’t even a close second. Knowing
the limits of Blue Coat’s Web Security Service,
the average Blue Coat sales representative will
position their cloud offering as appropriate for
smaller organizations and branch offices of larger
organizations. Few (if any) enterprises have
deployed Blue Coat as a pure cloud solution and
there’s a good reason for this. Blue Coat is in the
business of selling appliances. If you buy enough of
them, Blue Coat may even offer up its cloud service
as a very low-cost add on.
Zscaler boasts more than 5,000 enterprise cloud
security customers in over 180 countries.
To view sample Zscaler customers and read
their success stories by market and region—
including United Airlines, Humana, Kelly Services,
NBC, Société Générale, Tyco, Verizon, VMware,
Volkswagen, and the U.K. National Health Services
(with over 1.6 million users!)—connect to our
website at www.zscaler.com/customers.
Zscaler is backed by real SLAs
Unless there are real consequences for failing to
meet a service level agreement (SLA), an SLA is
merely a “best-effort intention.” Zscaler offers
documented SLAs for both availability and latency
with stated financial penalties (such as next
month’s service credit) in the event that Zscaler
fails to meet its obligations. Blue Coat, on the other
hand, will tell you they offer an SLA on availability
(not latency), but no predetermined penalties exist
in the event that Blue Coat’s Web Security Service
falls short of its SLA obligation.
BROADER FUNCTIONALITY
Zscaler’s Cloud Security Platform offers several key
functional advantages over Blue Coat’s ProxySG
and Web Security Service offerings. Here are a few
of the more significant advantages.
Blue Coat lacks a cloud-based
sandbox. Customers that have
migrated to a complete Blue Coat
cloud-based SWG (no on-premises
SWGs) are unable to use network
sandboxing technology to detect
threats and targeted attacks.
– Gartner Magic Quadrant for Secure Web
Gateway 2015
Real-time reporting and analytics
Blue Coat’s Reporter is a stand-alone software
product that provides dashboard and reporting
functionality. Blue Coat depicts its dashboard
as a “real-time” solution, but the fact is that the
Reporter software periodically aggregates log data
from ProxySG, ProxyAV, and other components
into a relational database. Data viewed within
dashboards and reports is only as recent as the last
data imported.
Zscaler, on the other hand, offers true real-time
reporting and dashboard analytics, enabling
users to interact with data instantly. Zscaler’s
patented Nanolog technology is an entirely new
kind of web logging, reporting, and analytics
application built from the ground up to address
today’s Big Data challenges. A non-relational
data store optimized for logging and reporting,
Nanolog is purpose-built with 65:1 compression to
allow IT organizations to quickly analyze massive
log histories such as web page downloads, web
mails, and attachments sent, posts published
on social networking sites, or instant messaging
transcripts—all in just seconds. This unique
capability brings together massive logs from
various locations to a central logging server for easy
reporting and analysis, while sophisticated indexing
technology fetches detailed historical information.
ZSCALER’S ADVANTAGES OVER BLUE COAT WHITE PAPER
SAML-based single sign-on (SSO)
To support single sign-on beyond a company’s intranet,
organizations are turning to SAML-based SSO solutions.
Zscaler integrates with four leading SAML-based SSO
vendors—including Okta, OneLogin, Ping Identity,
and RSA—to allow its users to safely and seamlessly
authenticate to the Zscaler Cloud Security Platform. This
integration also enables Zscaler to link users to security
events, rather than IP addresses alone.
Support for third-party MDM solutions
Corporations often use Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions to deploy and provision corporate
applications and data on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. However, MDMs are not designed
to be security solutions, as they do not address the risks of advanced threats like phishing and spyware, nor
do they protect from malicious apps. Zscaler complements leading MDM solutions by extending the benefits
of the Zscaler Cloud Security Platform to mobile devices—without the need to initiate a VPN connection first
from the mobile device to a physical appliance located back at the office.
Blue Coat’s Mobile Device Security Service extends the capabilities of its ProxySG appliances to mobile
devices, but such devices must first initiate a VPN connection and connect back to a ProxySG appliance. This
makes for a “clumsy” mobile security solution, resulting in decreased browsing performance and unhappy
mobile users.
EXCEPTIONAL VALUE
Built-in malware protection
One caution about Blue Coat is a lack of on-box
malware protection. Blue Coat customers must
acquire a separate appliance—at an additional
cost—called ProxyAV. Traffic then flows through
both the ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances before
reaching its destination, thus adding latency.
Zscaler is different because it incorporates
anti-malware protection in its platform at no
additional charge and adds no latency for
malware inspection due to its one-pass deep
packet inspection (DPI) architecture.
Mobile-based apps
Cloud-based apps
Social media
CLOUD SERVICES
Built-in SSL inspection
The use of SSL within advanced threats is steadily
on the rise—not only from the initial point of attack
but also to exfiltrate data from a compromised
system. Blue Coat’s answer? “Buy another box!”
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