Are YouTube and Netflix Impacting Your Microsoft 365 Experience?
Zscaler makes it easy to prioritize business-critical applications over other types of traffic.
The challenge of bandwidth control in the era of the cloud
Your applications are moving to the cloud and your internet traffic is growing, making it essential to prioritize business critical apps like Microsoft 365 (Office) over YouTube, live-streaming, and other traffic to ensure a fast user experience and fully realize the benefits of the cloud.
You may try to address these challenges by upgrading bandwidth before deploying Microsoft 365. However, most organizations still face network challenges and user experience suffers, despite increasing bandwidth.
Traditional solutions are not enough
To route traffic locally and establish rules for bandwidth use, you can deploy next-generation firewalls or UTM appliances at each site. That said, this approach is expensive and difficult to manage, and user experience still suffers. Appliances are simply not designed for window resizing, and if there is a conflict, they'll resort to dropping processing for some packets and stopping video streaming.
UTM/Firewall appliance spread
Zscaler simplifies bandwidth control by moving it to the cloud
It's time to move your security and controls to the cloud. By implementing Zscaler Firewall and Bandwidth Control, both integrated with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ platform, you can route traffic locally to the internet, providing the same level of protection to all users regardless of their location, and apply bandwidth management policies to prioritize critical business applications.
Transform with Zscaler
- Limit the impact of streaming media, file sharing, and social media on business apps
- Identify bandwidth constraints before they impede the user experience
- Align policies for all users to business needs, with granular rules by application class, location, and time
- Break out traffic locally for faster internet access
- Enable secure access to both business and personal applications
- Leverage window shaping and bandwidth throttling to avoid packet dropping and create a seamless user experience
- Eliminate the need to purchase, deploy, and manage new hardware
- Reduce MPLS backhaul costs by offloading internet traffic via local breakouts
- Eliminate bottlenecks and WAN latency by enforcing policies in the cloud
- Maintain unmatched security in all locations
Tailor bandwidth policies to align to business needs
Zscaler Bandwidth Control enables you to create and immediately implement granular policy. Typical bandwidth policies include limiting recreational traffic, such as streaming video, and giving business apps precedence over other traffic. With Zscaler, there are many more parameters you can use to define a policy.
Here are a few examples:
Prioritize Microsoft 365; guarantee 40%
Restrict YouTube streaming to 20%
Limit large downloads (e.g., Windows or macOS updates)
Gain detailed bandwidth visibility
Microsoft 365 now prevails, not YouTube. Before Zscaler, YouTube accounted for this customer’s largest consumption of bandwidth. With easy-to-use Zscaler bandwidth controls, the company was able to reserve 40% of its bandwidth specifically for Microsoft 365 while capping YouTube.
Schedule a Demo
Understand your threat exposure and how the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform can securely and quickly transform the way you do business.