Over the past two years, Zoom has emerged as an indispensable tool for organizations around the globe, supporting relationships not only among coworkers and partners, but also within families and communities — which is why Palo Alto Networks is especially proud that Zoom has named us Alliance Partner of the Year for 2022.
A significant source of Zoom’s success has been its dedication to enhancing the user experience. After all, countless variables between an end user and the Zoom service can potentially impact a virtual meeting experience. A user might be sitting too far away from their Wi-Fi router. Their laptop could be struggling with a memory issue. Or there could be a problem with their home internet connection.
Yet we all know that Zoom is a remarkably resilient and reliable product, having pioneered application-layer quality of service (QoS) and distributed multimedia routing, along with custom protocols to optimize traffic and adapt to fluctuating network conditions to get the best call quality possible. Zoom recently expanded these capabilities with the launch of its Quality of Service Subscription (QSS), which provides near real-time data streaming for network monitoring services. QSS provides details about network traffic in near real-time for every user, host, and participant in all meetings, webinars, and phone calls so that network admins can easily identify network issues and configure the data seamlessly into their internal monitoring systems.
Enter Palo Alto Networks Autonomous Digital Experience Management
This is where Palo Alto Networks comes into the story. Zoom partnered with Palo Alto Networks to enable new capabilities for their mutual customers around network and device analytics and intelligent remediation adding to the data available through its QSS service, to provide all the relevant data needed for troubleshooting quality issues. Palo Alto Networks Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) is the first product of its kind to integrate QSS from Zoom, offering per-minute root-cause analysis by correlating Zoom’s QSS feed with ADEM’s synthetic tests, which identify performance issues before they degrade the user experience.
ADEM offers root-cause analysis for meeting quality issues throughout the service delivery chain — from an end-user’s laptop to Zoom so that network admins can pinpoint meeting performance issues with unparalleled speed and accuracy. Now, instead of digging through dashboards and logs, Zoom customers can confidently identify the cause of a call-quality issue on a single dashboard. In addition, the new organization-wide views of the Zoom experience in ADEM make it easy for administrators to report on and improve user experience quickly. Moreover, with per-minute visibility into the cause of any Zoom meeting performance issue at the organization level, admins can make data-driven decisions about infrastructure upgrades and investments.
ADEM is part of Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE solution, which offers superior Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) 2.0 security. Prisma SASE secures all apps used by the hybrid workforce, regardless of whether users are at home, on the go, or in the office. ZTNA 2.0 is a next-generation cybersecurity framework that combines fine-grained, least-privilege access with continuous trust verification and deep, ongoing security inspection to protect all users, devices, apps and data everywhere – all from a unified product offering:
- Superior security that stops zero-day threats in zero time.
- Single-pane-of-glass visibility and management, consistent policy and shared data for all users and all apps.
- Cloud-native architecture for uncompromised performance backed by leading SLAs.
ADEM augments Prisma SASE by monitoring the performance of everything that can impact a user’s digital experience — devices, WiFi signal strength, LAN performance, ISP performance, Prisma Access performance and application availability. ADEM helps IT admins find and resolve performance issues that users encounter while working from home, in the office or while traveling. Unlike other digital experience monitoring (DEM) solutions, ADEM doesn't just provide visibility; it interprets the results of synthetic tests and endpoint monitoring to create actionable insights. As a result of ADEM’s suggested remediations, end users can get back to work faster, while the IT help desk can reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) and avoid escalations.
In addition to ADEM, Palo Alto Networks also provides SaaS Security Posture Management to the Zoom app. This solution helps enterprises avoid misconfiguration errors and ensures the right security policies are in place. This helps reduce human error that can arise while configuring crucial apps like Zoom, especially in large enterprise deployments.
A Winning Partnership
We’re honored to be named Zoom’s Alliance Partner of the Year in recognition of our contribution to delivering an unparalleled experience for Zoom users. And while awards are awesome, what’s better is the satisfaction of realizing a shared vision of excellence.
Palo Alto Networks and Zoom have a natural synergy. Both offer market-leading solutions that focus on performance, scale, security and reliability. Zoom has built groundbreaking application layer-quality of service data points and custom protocols, while ADEM delivers the robust and scalable underlying technology necessary to monitor network traffic in near real-time. By working together, Palo Alto Networks and Zoom empower our customers to deliver exceptional user experiences.
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