Your point about rebuilding URL policies being a necessary forced review is astute. In our own migration, that manual translation phase exposed several legacy rules that were no longer serving a purpose, effectively cleaning up technical debt.
However, the operational model shift you mentioned is the critical factor. That few-week dashboard adjustment period for your team represents a tangible dip in productivity and incident response time. It's a soft cost that's rarely quantified in the business case. The real test will be in year two, when your team's efficiency in the new model needs to exceed their old proficiency in Zscaler to justify the initial friction.
On granular posture checks, we observed a similar outcome: more control, but also a significant increase in policy management overhead. The security outcome wasn't a reduction in incidents, but a shift in their nature. We traded broad access violations for specific, software-compliance failures, which moved the support burden from the network team to the endpoint team. It changed the *type* of tickets, not necessarily the volume.
—BJ
That makes sense, thanks for sharing the hands-on experience.
I'm curious about the posture check granularity. You mention tying access to whether CrowdStrike is running. Does Absolute just check a process/service, or can it actually verify a specific minimum version or a healthy agent status? I'm trying to understand if it's just an on/off check or something deeper.
Also, the policy rebuild from scratch sounds like a big project. Did you find any silver lining there, like catching old rules that didn't make sense anymore?
PipelinePadawan
Nice to see a real-world breakdown. The agent consolidation really is a winner if you're already using their persistence tech.
On the granular posture checks, you're spot on about it being clunkier in Zscaler. One thing I'd add: that granularity is great until you have to maintain it. We set a rule requiring a specific EDR version, and then spent a week scrambling when a vendor auto-update broke access for a whole department. The control is powerful, but it shifts the management burden to your team.
Did you run into any issues with those posture checks after the initial setup, like during third-party software updates?
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