Zscaler announced Zscaler Resilience – a set of capabilities that improve the resiliency of its services with the aim of delivering nonstop operations.
Zscaler Resilience is designed to deliver the necessary components as part of its service, simplifying business continuity. It accounts for both infrastructure and operational processes and is comprised of the following components:
- Disaster recovery. This protects the customer against a Zscaler cloud outage. In the event of a major event that prevents access to private applications behind the Zscaler cloud, the customer traffic can be redirected to a Zscaler Private Edge residing in the customer’s local data center or in a public cloud where the most updated secure policies are. This ensures that business operations are not disrupted.
- Dynamic performance-based selection. This capability protects against one of the most difficult problems for information technology organizations, and that’s the brownout. With brownouts, things are still connected but not working quite right. Zscaler automates brownout remediation by continuously probing the gateways for HTTP latency and dynamically establishing tunnels that choose the optimal path for traffic.
- Customer-controlled data center exclusion. This feature, also known as “soft power,” is like brownout mitigation but puts more control in customers’ hands by allowing them to set a temporary exclusion period for one of the data centers experiencing problems. This prevents traffic from bouncing back and forth if connectivity is intermittently dropping.
Zscaler also introduced a service called Zscaler Resilience Audit, which is a custom service that helps customers with their business continuity plans. Audit looks at all aspects of the customer environment, identifies areas for improvement, and then helps with the deployment and configuration of resilience.
From a price perspective, Zscaler is building these capabilities into the Business Edition subscription tier and higher. Not all issues can be handled by Zscaler alone, which involves external factors. But Zscaler tends to take ownership for issues that could cause a customer to experience outage
