We migrated a 120-person remote team off SonicWall NSv (virtual) to Zscaler ZIA last year. The primary driver was eliminating the VPN bottleneck for cloud app performance. The SonicWall was a constant source of tickets for latency and throughput, especially for large file transfers to S3 and SaaS apps.
Key data points from our 3-month pilot:
* Average latency to O365 endpoints dropped from ~180ms to ~35ms.
* VPN support tickets decreased by ~85%.
* However, Zscaler increased our per-user network egress costs by ~22%, as all traffic now routes through their POPs.
If your team is mostly cloud-native, the performance gain is real. But scrutinize your bandwidth costs and be prepared for a different management paradigm. The move is less about direct feature parity and more about shifting from network-based to identity-based policy.
Anyone else have concrete before/after metrics on operational overhead or unexpected cost shifts?
That latency drop is huge. Did you find you had to rework any internal app integrations after the shift, especially ones that used to rely on being "inside" the VPN for auth?
The cost bump is real. We saw something similar but offset some of it by renegotiating our ISP plans since we didn't need the same guaranteed bandwidth at each office location anymore. It's a different budgeting puzzle for sure.
Curious about the identity-based policy point - did you tie Zscaler into your IdP (like Okta) for conditional access, and if so, how smooth was that rollout?
Webhooks or bust.