Everyone's buzzing about the new "ZPA-killer" that just launched, promising the same zero trust network access magic but at a supposedly revolutionary price point. Color me skeptical. We've been down this road before, and the initial sticker shock is just the tip of the iceberg.
Let's cut through the marketing fluff. A fifty percent price cut doesn't happen in a vacuum. Where are they cutting corners? Is it the global backbone? Zscaler's private network is their crown jewel, and building something comparable isn't cheap. Is it support and engineering? You get what you pay for, and when your sales team can't access the CRM at a critical moment, that half-price savings evaporates faster than a dropped packet.
We need to talk about the total cost of ownership, not just the license fee. What's the deployment overhead? Does this new contender require an army of consultants and months of professional services to get running, costs that get buried in the fine print? With ZPA, as much as it pains me to admit, the integration path for major cloud providers and existing IdPs is relatively well-trodden. A new entrant means being a guinea pig, dealing with undocumented bugs, and writing your own integration scripts. That's developer hours, security review cycles, and operational risk.
And let's not forget the ultimate cost: vendor lock-in. Once you architect your internal applications around a specific ZTNA model, migrating is a nightmare. It's not just swapping out an agent. It's re-evaluating every access policy, re-authenticating every service, and potentially re-architecting how applications are discovered and brokered. The new platform might be cheaper today, but the exit tax to leave them in three years could be astronomical if they decide to raise prices once they've captured market share.
I'm all for competition driving down Zscaler's frankly eye-watering costs. But before anyone gets excited, we need a ruthless audit of the new offering. What's their data privacy model? Where are the control planes hosted? What are the contractual terms around data ownership and price increases? Does it truly support a hybrid, multi-cloud reality, or is it just a VPN with a fancy dashboard?
I want to see detailed workflow reports from actual pilots, not gushing press releases. Show me the packet capture from a latency-sensitive application. Show me the security team's assessment of the tunnel protocols. Show me the bill for the first year, including all the hidden setup and management costs.
Just my two cents
Skeptic by default