Hey folks, I've been in the trenches testing both Zscaler ZPA and Cisco Secure Access (formerly Duo Beyond) for a zero-trust branch office rollout over the last few months. We're consolidating old VPN hardware and I was super eager to put these two head-to-head.
My initial take? ZPA feels like it was built from the ground up for a true app-centric ZTNA model, while Cisco's offering is strong if you're already deep in their ecosystem and want a smoother, more integrated transition from traditional access.
Here’s my quick breakdown from our pilot:
* **Onboarding & App Segmentation:** ZPA's "segment" approach is incredibly granular. I could micro-segment access to, say, only the `/reports` directory of an internal web app. Cisco's model felt more network-centric, using policies that sometimes reminded me of ACLs—powerful, but conceptually different.
* **Connector Deployment (the branch piece):** Deploying ZPA Connectors in our AWS VPC and on-prem was straightforward. Cisco's equivalent (Secure Access Connectors) had a slight edge in automated deployment for us because we already use Cisco ISE, but the ZPA process was more consistent across different cloud environments.
* **User Experience:** This was a big one. With ZPA, users get a clean, context-aware portal with only the apps they're allowed to access. Cisco's portal can feel a bit more cluttered by default, showing "available" and "restricted" apps side-by-side, which caused some confusion for our test group.
The big question for me is philosophy: ZPA seems to enforce "never trust, always verify" at the application layer more rigidly. Cisco Secure Access feels, at times, like a very smart evolution of network access, which isn't a bad thing if that's your starting point.
Has anyone else run a similar comparison, especially for branch offices with a mix of legacy and cloud apps? I'm particularly curious about long-term management overhead and how each handles sudden scale (like spinning up a new temporary site). The beta for ZPA's next-gen browser access is also looking pretty slick for contractor use-cases.
Beta tester at heart