Zscaler’s enhancements improve digital experiences in a cloud and hybrid workforce

Zscaler enhanced Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) with new Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) application monitoring and digital workflow service integrations to automatically pinpoint and remediate performance issues for improved employee collaboration and productivity.

Delivered as an integrated service on Zscaler’s cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange, ZDX provides unified visibility into user, connection and cloud app telemetry data to isolate and resolve user experience issues. The new integrations now enable security, networking, and help desk teams to work together to efficiently triage Microsoft Teams and Zoom quality issues, decrease resolution times, and optimize employee productivity.

“IT teams cannot provide a great user experience and proactively resolve UCaaS performance issues if they are unable to see or measure telemetry between employees and critical applications, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom,” said Dhawal Sharma, VP Products, Zscaler. “Zscaler Digital Experience addresses the three biggest challenges that prevent seamless collaboration for the hybrid workforce: siloed user data, limited legacy monitoring tools, and a lack of analytics and workflows that can optimize and improve the productivity and digital experience for employees no matter where they reside.”

Today’s highly mobile and cloud-first workforce rely on fast, secure connectivity and seamless collaboration experiences to maintain high productivity. According to research from Gartner, “By 2023, the number of remote workers will have doubled to over two-thirds of digital workers, shifting buyer requirements to demand work-anywhere capabilities.”

As a result, it is critical for IT teams to be able to quickly pinpoint performance issues on unified communications services, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and SaaS platforms, such as Microsoft 365. Enterprises that lack proper UCaaS monitoring capabilities will need to adopt new tools specifically designed to manage workforce communications without sacrificing performance.

The new ZDX enhancements deliver enterprise-grade monitoring capabilities by leveraging insights gathered through the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, a cloud-native platform of integrated services that acts as an intelligent switchboard to securely connect users, apps and devices over any network, at any location.

Operating as a unified service on the Zscaler platform, ZDX enables IT and security teams to proactively troubleshoot network and call quality problems by combining API-based monitoring of application-specific metrics with continuous and active monitoring of user device, network, and application availability insights for business-critical SaaS apps, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

• New visibility and management of UCaaS performance: Zscaler integrates with Microsoft Teams and Zoom through secure APIs to access granular user and application telemetry data all in one place. By offering an integrated view of all system data from meetings and user interactions, ZDX helps IT teams better detect and resolve sources of latency and packet loss that may impact employee experience and business efficiency.
• Expanded troubleshooting tools: ZDX enables security, networking, help desk teams to proactively triage unified communications issues, troubleshoot connection problems, decrease resolution times, and optimize user productivity. Because ZDX continually monitors performance, many connectivity problems can now be resolved proactively before they result in a trouble ticket.
• Enhanced Microsoft 365 support: IT teams can use ZDX to analyze trends, performance metrics, and digital experience scores to identify underlying problems and opportunities to improve user experiences with Microsoft 365.
• Full visibility into zero trust secured private apps: ZDX provides extensive network insights into user connectivity for secured private applications protected by Zscaler Private Access. IT and security teams benefit from a centralized dashboard with all relevant telemetry data to troubleshoot and resolve user experiences issues with private applications.
• Automated IT incident management with ServiceNow: ZDX integrates with ServiceNow ITSM platform through event-driven APIs for sharing real-time incident notifications. IT teams can automate IT ticket creation based on ZDX alerts, which streamlines remediation workflows for better IT incident management.

“When employees reported an issue, the source could be any combination of factors from the app, path to the app, hosting platform, a corporate device, or an employee’s home network, but we lacked the telemetry data to pinpoint the cause,” said Jeff Negrete, Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations, Verisk. “As a service that’s tightly integrated with our other Zscaler solutions, ZDX provided us with granular, real-time insights to help us solve troubleshooting gaps for our DevOps and help desk teams as we continue moving our business applications to the cloud and SaaS while simultaneously supporting our newly distributed workforce.”

“We have employees distributed across more than 20 locations around Auckland and currently working from home, making it challenging to ensure employee productivity and experience with critical applications, like Microsoft Teams,” said Adam Gower, Head of Digital Operations, Watercare Services. “Zscaler Digital Experience was extremely easy to deploy and gave us access to granular telemetry data for fast diagnosing and resolution of user experiences issues before employee productivity is interrupted.”

“Understanding end-user network performance, including packet loss, is a key part of providing the level of consistent service and call quality consumers and business users expect,” said Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering at Zoom. “The joint collaboration and deep integration efforts between Zoom services and Zscaler Digital Experience, provide our shared customers inline monitoring of user and application telemetry data to easily track Zoom application performance and call quality.”