Why a Mid-Market Biotech Research Organization Walked Away From Zscaler

Most Zscaler displacement stories are about latency. This one started as a renewal conversation, became a latency conversation, and ended as a budget conversation. This Zscaler alternative case study is what happened when a mid-market biotech research organization decided not to renew, and what it looked like on the other side.

The customer is a mid-market biotech research organization in North America with a clinical and scientific workforce spread across research sites and a steady tail of remote staff. They replaced Zscaler with dope.security and got their SWG running across the workforce inside the first month, through a channel partner.

Quick read

• Industry: Biotech
• Replaced: Zscaler
• Deployed: dope.SWG

Where things stood

Zscaler had been in place for years. The research team had inherited it from an earlier security regime, renewed it once on autopilot, and lived with it. The complaints were the ones every Zscaler customer eventually has. Backhauled traffic added latency to research applications that were already chatty. Remote scientists on home networks felt the slowdown more than the office-based teams. The console required more specialist attention than the IT team had to give. And the renewal quote had grown every cycle.

The CISO had a short list of things that had to change at this renewal. Inspect HTTPS without dragging every packet through a regional PoP. Get the research workforce off backhauled traffic. Reduce the spend, not just the year-over-year increase. And keep the audit answer defensible at a biotech that already had to talk about data movement carefully.

Why the on-device proxy made the math work

dope.security’s fly-direct architecture moves the proxy onto the endpoint. Web filtering, SSL inspection, and policy enforcement happen on the device. There’s no cloud PoP to route through, no backhaul, no waiting in line behind another tenant’s traffic.

For a biotech research workforce, that meant research apps that didn’t slow down during the cutover, and remote scientists whose home network experience improved instead of degraded. The IT team ran the migration in waves with their channel partner. Policy was authored in the dope.console and pushed to endpoints in minutes, not the maintenance windows the Zscaler change-control process had taught everyone to expect.

The dope.security migration playbook for Zscaler customers is straightforward, and the team leaned on it. Pilot on a known-friendly user group. Cut over by org unit. Decommission the Zscaler agent. The whole sequence ran inside the first month, not the multi-quarter migration Zscaler renewals tend to assume.

“Zscaler was fine when our workforce sat in one building. It stopped being fine when our research staff went distributed. We moved to dope.security, the backhaul went away, and our renewal quote dropped by a double-digit percentage in the process.”

— CISO, a mid-market biotech organization

The non-technical reason

Architecture and price got dope.security on the shortlist. The 24/7 white glove global support team got it across the line.

The CISO had been burned by enterprise vendor support before. Tickets that lived for weeks. Tier-1 reps who hadn’t read the case before joining the call. With dope.security, the customer was on a first-name basis with the support team inside the first month, and policy questions that used to take a calendar item now took a chat-length reply. For a biotech IT team that runs lean, that kind of relationship was worth more than another row in a feature matrix.

What changed

Inside the first month, the team had SSL inspection running across every managed endpoint, on or off the corporate network, without the latency tax. The Zscaler tenant was decommissioned without a multi-quarter migration project. The CISO had a clean answer for the auditor and a real reduction against the previous renewal quote. And the research workforce got back the seconds per request that Zscaler’s PoP architecture had been quietly charging.

The CISO’s read on the project was simple. The renewal turned into a replacement, the replacement turned into a faster workforce, and the math worked.

FAQ

Why do biotech and research organizations replace Zscaler? The most common reasons we hear are backhaul latency on research applications, slower experience for distributed scientists on home networks, a console that needs specialist attention, and renewal quotes that grow every cycle. An on-device SWG removes the backhaul, simplifies the console, and reshapes the spend.

How fast is a Zscaler-to-dope.security migration? Most migrations measure rollout in weeks, not quarters. The dope.security agent deploys via the existing endpoint management tool, the policy moves into dope.console, and the Zscaler client is decommissioned by org unit. There is no PoP architecture to stand up first, which is the part of a Zscaler-equivalent rollout that takes the longest.

Does dope.security work for biotech and research environments with sensitive data? The proxy runs on the endpoint, so decrypted traffic stays local to the device and is not routed through a vendor data center for inspection. That is a better privacy posture for biotech than backhauled SSL inspection, and the dope.console provides the policy and log evidence auditors expect.

About dope.security

dope.security, the Distributed On-device Proxy Endpoint, is the preferred security vendor of security leaders ranging from SMBs and Midsize companies, to Fortune 500’s, to world’s leading VC and PE firms  Deployed across 83 countries, dope.security is securing web, data, and AI traffic around the world on its patented fly-direct architecture.