How a Mid-Market Healthcare Organization Replaced Zscaler With dope.security

A Zscaler alternative for healthcare needs three things at once: real HTTPS visibility, no backhaul tax on clinical workflows, and a renewal conversation that goes the right direction. This Zscaler alternative for healthcare case study is what happened when a mid-market healthcare organization put all three on the same checklist and went to market.

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

Quick read

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

Where things stood

Zscaler had been the secure web gateway of record for years. The legacy console worked for the team that had originally bought it. The architecture worked for the workforce that had originally used it. Both things had changed.

The CISO had a short list of issues to fix at this renewal. Inspect HTTPS without dragging every packet through a regional PoP. Get the clinical staff off backhauled traffic that was adding latency to applications that were already chatty. Reduce the renewal spend, not just the year-over-year increase. And keep the HIPAA-aware answer defensible at audit.

Why Zscaler stopped being the right answer

Zscaler displacement projects in healthcare cluster around the same four complaints. Backhauled SSL inspection adds latency to clinical applications. Remote clinical and administrative staff on home networks feel the slowdown more than the office-based teams. The console requires more specialist attention than a mid-market IT team usually has. And the renewal quote grows every cycle, regardless of what the workforce did.

The CISO ran the bake-off looking for an SSE that didn’t have any of those four properties.

Why the on-device proxy made the math work

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

For a healthcare workforce, the architectural payoff is concrete. Clinical applications don’t slow down during the cutover, because there’s no remote inspection hop to add. Remote staff on home networks see the same policy and the same experience as someone in the office. Policy updates are pushed from the dope.console to endpoints in minutes, not the maintenance windows Zscaler change-control had taught everyone to expect.

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

“We were renewing Zscaler on autopilot. We ran one bake-off and changed our minds. dope.security gave us the same SSL inspection, less latency, and a renewal number that finally went the right direction.”

— CISO, a mid-market healthcare organization

The non-technical reason

Healthcare IT teams pick vendors on support as much as architecture. The 24/7 white glove global support team at dope.security is the reason the CISO signed.

The team 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 engineers inside the first month, and policy questions that used to take a calendar item now took a chat-length reply.

What changed

Inside the first month, the team had SSL inspection running across every managed endpoint, on or off the corporate network, without the backhaul tax. The Zscaler tenant was decommissioned without a multi-quarter migration project. The CISO had a clean HIPAA-aware answer for the auditor and a real reduction against the previous renewal quote.

The clinical workforce got back the seconds-per-request that Zscaler’s PoP architecture had been quietly charging. That was the part that closed the project for the operations side.

FAQ

Why do healthcare organizations replace Zscaler with dope.security? The most common reasons are backhaul latency on clinical applications, slower experience for remote and distributed staff 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 in healthcare? Most healthcare Zscaler migrations measure rollout in weeks, not quarters. dope.SWG 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.

Is dope.security HIPAA-aware and appropriate for healthcare environments? The proxy runs on the endpoint, so decrypted clinical traffic stays local to the device and is not routed through a vendor data center for inspection. That is a better privacy posture for healthcare than backhauled SSL inspection, and 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 for security leaders across SMBs, midsize enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, and the world’s top VC and PE firms. Deployed in 83 countries, dope.security protects web, data, and AI traffic globally through its patented fly-direct architecture.