Streamline cloud migration to AWS while maintaining zero trust security and end-to-end performance visibility with Zscaler.
Sponsored by Zscaler
Organizations migrating resources to the cloud are often focused on the end state: how the new public cloud environment will allow them to scale capacity in response to growing demands, reduce data center overhead, and deliver new capabilities to the business more quickly.
But of course, success starts with the migration process, and application migration is about far more than merely moving workloads. It requires a comprehensive understanding of application dependencies, consistent visibility into performance, and secure communications between users, applications, and workloads.
Large-scale enterprise cloud migrations commonly last for at least several months, and they sometimes stretch across years. Throughout this period, organizations must ensure users have reliable access to applications across both cloud and on-premises environments, while navigating hidden dependencies and complex cutovers to avoid disrupting the business.
These dependencies often influence the timing and structure of migration efforts, determining which applications must migrate in concert and which can continue operating from different locations. For example, an application may rely on a database that is shared with several other applications. Or software might depend on another service that is not scheduled to move during the same migration wave.
If teams discover these dependencies too late, they may need to delay the migration, reorganize the wave, or maintain temporary connectivity between application components split across on-premises and cloud environments.
Successful migration requires IT and business leaders to plan not only where applications will run, but also how users will reach them, how teams will identify performance problems, and how workloads will communicate securely throughout the transition. Together, Zscaler and AWS provide these capabilities, helping organizations execute cloud migrations more securely, maintain visibility into application performance, and keep migration plans on track.
The Cloud Imperative
In the hype surrounding AI over the past several years, some attention has shifted away from enterprise IT architecture and cloud migrations. However, public cloud migrations remain critical to business success, and Gartner forecasts 21.3% growth in public cloud services in 2026, largely driven by organizations accelerating workload migration and embracing modernization at scale.
Still, around 42% of strategic workloads remain on-premises today. Some organizations are keeping those workloads in-house because of security requirements, latency requirements, or other carefully considered reasons. But many, no doubt, have failed to move resources to the public cloud due to considerable migration challenges, which include security, speed, visibility, and performance.
This hesitation is understandable, but it is causing companies to miss out on business-critical benefits. For example, the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework benchmarks show a 27% decrease in cost per user, a 57% reduction in downtime, and a 34% decrease in security events after a migration to the public cloud.
Organizations that overcome these migration challenges can realize these benefits without the temporary performance issues and security risks that have often accompanied cloud migrations.
Three Major Migration Challenges
Successful cloud migrations deliver greater agility, scalability, and resilience across applications, infrastructure, and IT operations. But to realize these benefits, organizations must overcome three closely connected migration challenges.
Challenge #1: Maintaining Application Access
Organizations rarely move all of their applications to the public cloud all at once. During a phased migration, some applications remain on-premises, while others run in a cloud environment like AWS, creating a temporary (but often prolonged) hybrid environment.
Users still need reliable access to enterprise applications during this period, but providing this access is often more complicated than IT leaders expect. In many environments, application access is still tied to network location through VPNs, IP addresses, and firewall rules. When applications are moved, IT teams must rework access paths and update policies. Even then, these workarounds can add latency, degrade the user experience, and expand the attack surface.
Solution: Zscaler Private Access (ZPA)
ZPA helps organizations discover private applications and connects authorized users directly to these applications, rather than placing users directly on the network. Instead of basing access policies on static IP addresses, network location, or complex access control lists, ZPA grants access based on the user’s identity, device, and the application’s context, providing authorized users with consistent access without expanding network exposure.
Because ZPA decouples user access from network location, organizations can reduce the need to reconfigure user connectivity when applications move between data centers, VPCs, and public cloud environments. As a result, concerns about application access and poor user experience are less likely to delay milestones or undermine confidence in cloud migrations.
Challenge #2: Securing Workloads Across Distributed Cloud Environments
Organizations running application workloads across multicloud environments face growing security complexity. Securing workload communications across these environments adds another layer of challenge.
Distributed workloads must communicate across ingress, egress, east-west, and private network traffic paths spanning clouds, data centers, regions, and hosts. When organizations rely on inconsistent security controls across these environments, they increase the attack surface and create opportunities for lateral movement.
Traditional VPN and firewall architectures don’t always consistently enforce least-privilege access across the application estate and also add to operational costs and complexity.
Solution: Zscaler Zero Trust Cloud
Zscaler Zero Trust Cloud extends zero trust security across multicloud environments by providing real-time visibility, consistent threat and data protection, and host-based microsegmentation for workloads. It secures all traffic paths, including ingress, egress, east-west, and private network traffic, while enforcing uniform security policies across clouds.
By forwarding all workload traffic to the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange (ZTE), the solution performs cloud-scale TLS inspection and applies threat protection, inline data protection, and strict least-privilege access controls, eliminating potential lateral movement.
By using ZTE as the unified platform to secure workloads across cloud and data center environments, organizations can eliminate the cost and complexity associated with legacy firewalls and VPNs, while also providing flexible security and policy management, as well as consistent protection against threats and data loss.
Challenge #3: Enabling End-to-End Performance Visibility
As applications move to the cloud and users become more distributed, performance depends on multiple components across the user-to-application path.
In this new architecture, performance can be affected by user devices, Wi-Fi networks, internet connections, network paths, security services, cloud environments, or the application itself. Traditional monitoring tools provide separate views of endpoints, networks, and applications, leading to fragmented visibility.
As a result, IT teams may have difficulty determining which component is responsible when users experience lags and dropped connections. Remote and hybrid work further complicates troubleshooting because it requires IT teams to consider home networks and personal devices that they don’t control. When performance problems pop up, these issues can reduce productivity for both end users and IT support professionals.
Solution: Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX)
ZDX is an AI-powered digital experience monitoring solution delivered as a service from the Zscaler cloud. It provides end-to-end visibility into the user-to-application path, helping IT teams monitor and troubleshoot digital experience issues across distributed environments.
The solution gives IT teams insights into performance across endpoints, Wi-Fi, ISPs, network paths, and applications, helping them quickly triage problems and then deploy remote troubleshooting capabilities. This results in far fewer IT tickets and a superior user experience.
ZDX also helps IT teams measure digital experience across users, locations, and departments to identify trends and improve performance over time. For example, Liberty Mutual Insurance deployed ZDX to improve performance for remote users experiencing persistent issues. The company now uses ZDX across the organization to eliminate issues with service provider latency, wireless routers, and desktop computer memory leaks, among other problems.
Zscaler and AWS: A Unified Approach to Secure Migration
AWS and Zscaler combine cloud infrastructure as a service with consistent zero trust access across hybrid and multicloud estates.
Migrations succeed when cloud infrastructure, access, security, and visibility operate as one architecture, rather than as a disconnected collection of point solutions. AWS provides the scalable cloud foundation and native controls for hosting and connecting applications, while Zscaler extends secure, identity-based zero trust access across users, applications, and workloads wherever they reside.
By unifying access, security, and visibility across AWS and the broader application estate, organizations can reduce migration risk without creating unnecessary complexity. The result is a secure, scalable foundation that supports both the immediate move to the cloud and continued modernization.
Learn How to Modernize Securely
During a recent webinar hosted by Techstrong, Zscaler explored how organizations can address access, security, and performance throughout the application migration lifecycle. Attendees will learn how to identify private applications for migration planning, preserve reliable user access and end-to-end visibility, and secure communications for workloads distributed across cloud and on-premises environments.
We also discuss how AWS-native services and Zscaler capabilities work together to apply consistent zero trust controls across hybrid and multicloud estates.
By building security and visibility into the migration process from the very beginning, organizations can reduce disruption, accelerate migration milestones, and establish a foundation for continued application modernization.
