What Zerto Zscaler Actually Does and When to Use It

Your storage just failed over to a recovery site, but your security team still won’t let traffic through until the firewall rules catch up. Downtime grows. Engineers sigh. That’s where Zerto and Zscaler start to look like a power duo rather than two logos on a slide deck.

Zerto handles continuous data protection and disaster recovery, replicating workloads across sites in near real time. Zscaler focuses on secure access: identity-driven traffic inspection, policy enforcement, and zero-trust segmentation. Used together, they keep recovery fast and access locked down without breaking your recovery runbooks. The trick is making the two speak the same language—identity and intent rather than static IP lists.

When a failover is triggered in Zerto, workloads shift to a secondary location or cloud. Normally, that shift would confuse perimeter security tools. With Zscaler in place, policies stay tied to user identity and application context instead of a fixed subnet. The result is a redeployed environment where access control doesn’t need manual babysitting. Engineers can test recovery in isolation, then cut production over with confidence that the same security posture follows them across clouds.

A simple way to think about Zerto Zscaler integration: Zerto moves the data, Zscaler moves the trust. Map Zerto’s VM or application tags to Zscaler policies through your identity provider, such as Okta or Azure AD. When Zerto spins up new instances, they inherit the right policy automatically. No ticket queue. No waiting for firewall edits. Just access that keeps pace with recovery automation.

Best practices for teams pairing Zerto and Zscaler

• Anchor security rules to identity (through OIDC or SAML), not IP addresses.
• Rotate service credentials regularly and store them in a managed vault.
• Audit the recovery site’s policy enforcement after each DR test, not after a real event.
• Monitor latency between traffic steering in Zscaler and workload promotion in Zerto.

Core benefits

• Rapid failover that keeps zero-trust intact.
• Unified visibility for ops and security teams.
• Consistent performance thanks to dynamic routing.
• Lower administrative overhead during tests or real outages.
• Stronger compliance posture with verified policy mapping.

For developers, this pairing means fewer break-glass moments. Recovery events look like regular deploys, just faster. Logs line up cleanly, RBAC stays consistent, and nobody has to reroute traffic by hand. It boosts developer velocity because the boring, risky parts—firewall updates, policy sync, credential scoping—are all handled upstream.

Platforms like hoop.dev turn those access rules into guardrails that enforce policy automatically. You write intent once, and every DR run honors it. That’s a future-proof way to keep recovery reliable and security repeatable.

How do I connect Zerto and Zscaler?

You connect them through the identity layer. Use your existing IDP to issue tokens that Zscaler recognizes and let Zerto tag workloads with identity metadata. Each component then stays aware of who is accessing what, even during failover.

In short, Zerto protects your operations, Zscaler protects your users, and together they make recovery as safe as production. That’s a pairing worth configuring well before the next outage drills your nerves.

See an Environment Agnostic Identity-Aware Proxy in action with hoop.dev. Deploy it, connect your identity provider, and watch it protect your endpoints everywhere—live in minutes.