VPN vs. ZPA (Zscaler Private Access) | An Overview

I am Patrick Bach Sylvan and I'm Lisa Lorenzen and today we're gonna do a interesting side-by-side demo we're going to show you what it is like for a traditional user experience going through a traditional VPN and compare and contrast that and show what that experience looks like as a user goes through private access so I'll be playing the role of the Z scaler private access user as you can see on my desktop and Lisa is going to be playing the role of an old-school VPN user so we're gonna do it in a challenge scenario so the first challenge we're gonna do is we're gonna do something that everyone is familiar with every day we're going to connect to our corporate network and fire up email often companies don't expose their email servers or in this case we're gonna show at Microsoft Outlook in exchange to the Internet and so they usually require the user to do something first like log on to a VPN so we're gonna compare and contrast this experience live showing both of our desktops you ready let's go okay we're gonna start now so one of the first things you'll see is there is no concept in private access of logging in or out of a VPN once you've enrolled in the solution you're never logging in and out there's no such thing and so as a result for me to launch outlook I just launched outlook the way I normally always would have I on the other hand I'm having to connect to the VPN establish an IPSec tunnel and then go into my outlet client so as soon as I get my connection up which we will notice very shortly I will be able to get into my email so if we were racing I think you won that one maybe just by a little bit yeah but I have a challenge that I think I can win let's give it a shot let's see what we can learn on the network yeah so because we're both connected to the corporate network and online we're gonna demonstrate what kind of access or visibility we have to the remote environment and we thought we'd do that a little technical and do so by launching a port scanner so here's an example port scanner we're both configured to scan the exact same address ranges and if we go ahead and start our scans we're probably gonna see that the results come back pretty different even though my machine it's connected to the same network as Lisa's we're both getting email proving that my results are zero I don't find anything on the other hand I can see all sorts of things around me and I think when we say we're both connected to the network really that's no longer true because I'm clearly connected to the network you're connected to an application that's right that's illustrating something very different that's happening with private access because we're never putting the Machine on the remote network and never even gets an IP address in that environment there's absolutely nothing for it to port scan it doesn't even know the actual network that it's communicating with even though I still have application access so for our next demo we're going to show you something that I do several times a day which is switch networks and this could happen when you go from a wired to a wireless network or you walk out the door off the Wi-Fi and switch to LTE this would be just as true a phone as a desktop device and probably more so right now we're both connected to the Z scaler or guest network and we're going to show what happens if we disconnect from that network and connect to a hotspot instead I'm actually going to load my Z scalar app just so you can visually see what's happening but I'm gonna do the exact same steps that Lisa is doing so I'm disconnecting from guests and we're both going to connect to a different network in this case a hotspot that we have set up and my VPN tunnel has gone down so I'm being prompted to connect yet again and if you noticed you had to watch quickly my Z scale our app showed that a network connection changed I got a completely different public Internet address but I'm already up and fully authenticated as an end user I don't even have to worry about doing anything different when I'm on different network connections so if I go load up my browser and I go back to you'll see that I'm still accessing it as without any hiccups as if nothing ever happened and I'm waiting for my VPN to reconnect one more time and as soon as it reconnects I will be able to go back to JIRA as well it's not that you'd ever have never disconnects when you're on an airplane isn't oh my gosh No so hopefully that gives you a little bit of a feel of the end user experience of what it's like going through a couple decade old legacy VPN and descaler private access we also wanted to compare and contrast a little bit of the administration experience of getting reporting and analytics and seeing what users and applications are on your network and kind of compare those side-by-side in a in a contrasting basis as well so with that I'm going to login to the CPA admin UI you see on my screen when you when you log in to private access right out of the gate it is very application centric and user centric we're not surfacing ports and protocols and lower level networking capability because that's not relevant in a solution where you're providing named users access to named applications and so right out of the gate you'll see I've got dashboards for applications that are in my environment I can see which ones exist I can see applications we've automatically discovered I can see which ones are in use the most and there's all kinds of different ways of visualizing this data but then I can also pivot and go into users and I can see what users that are connected to private access as well as what applications these users are using which ones are consuming the most bandwidth as an example when we look at what we can see for a user connecting to a VPN it's pretty standard that you can see who the user is you can see what role they have you can see when they connect and disconnect but you don't learn a lot more about what the user it was actually doing on the network and this is a place where CPA really shines so one of the big advantages of CPA is it allows you to see who is connecting to your applications and what applications they're connecting to you get a lot of visibility into that and you also get more control over who is connecting to what application or even who can see that the application exists so if you liked what you saw here please come to the Z scaler website we've got a lot of resources on zpa from solution briefs and ebooks to video testimonials from people who are using it every day

Channel: Zscaler Inc.

Views: 37,725

Rating: 4.6177473 out of 5

Keywords: internet security, web security, security as a service, cloud security, zscaler

Id: gvNMh4-8jiE

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2019