Alright, gather 'round the corporate campfire. So the higher-ups have seen the buzzwords and the glossy sales decks and now you're tasked with running a Zscaler PoC. The goal, presumably, is to prove it's the magical cloud security panacea before signing a hefty contract. Let's be real: their onboarding team will give you a metrics wishlist that makes them look good. Your job is to capture data that tells the actual story.
First, ditch the idea that this is just about "seeing if it works." You need to define what "works" even means for your specific chaos. Is it about offloading VPN capacity? "Reducing attack surface"? Their marketing will happily define success for you, but don't let them. Start by instrumenting your existing edge. Get a baseline for at least two weeks *before* you turn on Zscaler. Capture:
* **VPN concentrator load** (peak concurrent users, bandwidth)
* **Direct internet egress traffic** volume and destinations (you might be shocked)
* **Time to resolve** internal help desk tickets for "web filtering" or "site access" issues
* A sample of **latency** to key SaaS apps (Office 365, Salesforce, etc.) from several typical user locations
Then, during the PoC, measure the exact same things. The delta is your actual value, not some pretty dashboard they provide. Pay special attention to the "free alternative" you already have: the internet. Compare Zscaler's latency to a direct connection for those SaaS apps. If their "nearest cloud node" adds 50ms, that's a tangible user experience cost.
And for the love of licenses, **test the exceptions workflow**. Every org has legacy junk that needs to bypass the proxy. How painful is it to create a PAC file bypass or an IP exclusion? How many clicks to whitelist a mistakenly blocked internal app? That's your future administrative overhead right there. Document the time it takes.
Finally, the metric nobody wants to talk about: the **soft cost of lock-in**. Once you route all your traffic through their cloud, what's your exit strategy? The PoC is your one chance to feel that viscosity. Try simulating a partial rollback for a department. Is it a switch flip or a multi-week support ticket?
Their metrics will show green checkmarks. Your job is to find the hidden price tags.
― Finn
FOSS advocate