Cloudflare Zero Trust Services vs. Zscaler Private Access

I wanted to securely connect to my servers without getting tracked by malicious attackers, even though I was on public Wi-Fi. Security was my top priority, and I also wanted a setup that was easy and quick to start and provided great network performance. Cloudflare's Zero trust matches my criteria for becoming my first choice.

Incentivized

The tool is, for the most part, very intuitive. Most of our issues so far (working through them with our Resident Engineer) are the one-off applications. We are working on some exemptions to make them functional. Besides that, the team loves the tool and how it can provide better security than our previous tool.

Incentivized

• Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
• Excellent protection for remote users.
• Best in class browser isolation techniques.

Incentivized

• Allows strong cyber security corporate policies
• Very reliable VPN application that operates at 100% efficiency
• Very easy to be configured with friendly user interface

Incentivized

• Cloudflare picks the nearest device location to route the traffic, but It would be great if we could select any particular location.
• Cloudflare enables monitoring for all the connected clients; it would be great if we could monitor any individual client device while keeping some client devices private.
• Sometimes, its DNS is not able to resolve a few project websites; we have to manually purge the cache and even disable the Security to get the work done. So, it would be better if we could manually provide a DNS list or whitelist some websites.

Incentivized

• Granularity and Complexity of Policy Enforcement
• Application Segmentation and Listener Configuration - The way applications are defined and listened for is fundamental to ZPA, but can be a source of frustration, especially when dealing with legacy or non-HTTP protocols
• The ZCC is the user's primary gateway, but its control over local system network behavior can sometimes clash with enterprise requirements.

Incentivized

Within a few hours, new engineers are trained in basic tasks and are quite happy they are able to resolve issues independently. After SSO is configured, onboarding is as simple as signing into m365 via a web browser popup.

Incentivized

Few things stand out. The ease of access: It very convenient - one click to open add details and done. Packet capture: Can't talk enough about this feature. Troubleshooting private access is always problematic,but this feature helped a lot. One thing that can be improved is early warning about expiring authentication

Incentivized

Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.

As long as all Cloudflare products and services rely on anycast technology, in a complex approach Cloudflare is faster and more relevant for cloud applications. The balance between security and performance is fully established. Also, Cloudflare has quite a good stack for API connection protection, like the API Shield example, which makes it more effective compared to F5 for example. Warp as a ZTNA agent gives better visibility and device posture information than FortiClient does.

Incentivized

All of these tools are for different needs. Zscaler Private Access being for internal seems very simple as it really only allows filtering up to L4 whereas ZIA allows for filtering up to L7. ZDX often tries to give insight into the environment but since it only works with preconfigured items, that then means when a new problem shows up - ZDX isn't helpful troubleshooting postmortem. For the internal side of the house - Zscaler Private Access' strength is its simplicity to configure.

Incentivized

• Cloudflare has provided us with 100% uptime even during planned maintenance
• Cloudflare has reduced time for engineering fixes from hours (or days) to minutes in some cases (primarily through Workers)

Incentivized

• Positive: We have now charged users internally for the service
• Negative: Dealing with users who also have the Zscaler Client Connector for their company, can cause confusions
• Negative: Enabling the Zscaler Internet Access entitlement has been a major headache for us because Zscaler Private Access users can't autheniticate through ZIA on a non corporate device.

Incentivized