What Happens After Access Is Granted? Bringing Deep Observability to Zscaler Private Access

Organizations are rapidly replacing legacy VPNs with Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions like Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) to provide secure, identity- and context-based access to private applications without exposing them to the internet.

In a modern threat landscape, policy-based secure access is a critical first step. As users, devices, applications, policies, and risk profiles evolve, security teams need to baseline application behavior, identify policy drift, and maintain visibility into activity after access is granted. By combining Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) with Gigamon Application Metadata Intelligence (AMI), part of the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, organizations can extend visibility across hybrid cloud environments, detect abnormal patterns, reduce operational blind spots, and accelerate threat detection and investigations.

Why Visibility Still Matters in a Zero Trust Environment

ZTNA solutions like Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) have become essential for modern enterprises because they provide secure, direct access to private applications without exposing users to the corporate network or exposing those applications to the internet. Unlike legacy VPNs that place users on the network, ZPA connects users only to the specific applications they are authorized to access.

This approach helps reduce attack surface while supporting hybrid work, cloud migration, third-party access, and application modernization initiatives.

Policy-based secure access is essential, but security teams still need deeper context to identify lateral movement, anomalous traffic, and application behavior after access is granted. Without that visibility, organizations can struggle to validate policy effectiveness, investigate incidents efficiently, or identify suspicious activity across hybrid cloud environments.

Extending Visibility Across Encrypted Zero Trust Traffic

Encryption is fundamental to Zero Trust security, but it can limit what downstream monitoring tools see. As traffic moves through encrypted tunnels, security and observability tools may have reduced access to the telemetry and application context needed to detect threats and investigate suspicious activity.

Gigamon helps extend visibility by extracting and enriching with application metadata and network-derived telemetry from network traffic. This added insight enables organizations to deliver enriched telemetry to monitoring and analytics tools.

The result is deep observability across hybrid cloud environments without compromising the security and access control benefits of Zero Trust architectures.

Bringing Together Access Control and Deep Observability

The Gigamon and Zscaler integration combines the strengths of both offerings.

ZPA provides the “who,” “where,” and “why”:

Who is accessing an application and from what device/posture

Which applications users are authorized to reach

Why access was granted, including policy context, device posture, and user risk

Identity- and context-aware access enforcement

Gigamon AMI adds the “how” and “what”:

Application behavior insights

East-West traffic visibility

Local LAN traffic and TLS telemetry

Latency and performance intelligence

Together, the integration provides security and IT teams with a more complete understanding of application sessions and activity across hybrid cloud environments.

Detecting Lateral Movement Faster

Attackers rarely stop at initial access. Once inside an environment, they often attempt to move laterally between workloads, applications, and systems to escalate privileges or access sensitive data.

This East-West traffic can be difficult to monitor in hybrid cloud environments where traffic patterns are highly distributed and increasingly encrypted. Visibility into activity after access is granted is critical for identifying suspicious behavior and potential lateral movement.

The combined Gigamon and Zscaler solution helps organizations extend visibility beyond initial access to better detect:

Suspicious application behavior

Unauthorized communication between workloads

Abnormal traffic patterns

Potential post-compromise activity

By correlating ZPA identity- and context-aware access information with Gigamon application metadata and network-derived telemetry, security teams can investigate threats faster and gain clearer context into user and application behavior.

Using Metadata to Accelerate Investigations and Reduce Noise

Security teams today are overwhelmed with alerts, fragmented telemetry, and disconnected tools. Analysts are often forced to pivot across multiple consoles during investigations while sorting through massive volumes of network and log data with limited context.

The challenge is not simply collecting more telemetry; it’s extracting meaningful context from the data organizations already have.

Gigamon AMI helps address this challenge by extracting and enriching nearly 6,000 metadata attributes from network traffic and delivering high-value intelligence to existing security and observability tools. By correlating Gigamon application metadata with identity-aware context from ZPA, security teams can connect user activity, application behavior, and network traffic more quickly during investigations.

Instead of forwarding every packet and log indiscriminately, organizations can filter out low-value or known-good traffic before it reaches downstream security and monitoring tools. This helps reduce unnecessary SIEM ingestion costs, improves signal-to-noise ratios, and enables analysts to focus on the alerts and investigations that matter most.

With richer context and fewer blind spots, organizations can improve incident triage, accelerate investigations, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and improve operational efficiency across security operations.

Continuously Validating Zero Trust Policies

Zero Trust is not a one-time deployment; it requires continuous validation. The integration enables organizations to independently verify that users are accessing only approved applications and resources in alignment with least-privilege access policies.

This added layer of observability helps organizations:

Strengthen governance

Improve compliance reporting

Identify potential policy gaps earlier

Improve Zero Trust policy validation

Maintaining Visibility Across Hybrid Cloud Environments

Maintaining consistent visibility across hybrid cloud environments has become increasingly complex as applications, workloads, and users continue to distribute across on-premises infrastructure and public cloud environments.

The Gigamon and Zscaler integration helps organizations extend consistent observability across hybrid cloud deployments, including data centers, VMware-based environments, and public cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure.

This enables security teams to monitor East-West traffic more consistently, reduce operational blind spots, and feed optimized telemetry into centralized security and observability tools.

Supporting the Future of Hybrid Cloud Security

As organizations continue to adopt Zero Trust and hybrid cloud architectures, security teams need more than secure access controls. They need visibility into application activity and potential lateral movement after Zero Trust access has been granted. By combining Zscaler Private Access and Gigamon AMI, organizations can reduce blind spots, accelerate investigations, and strengthen Zero Trust operations with deep observability across hybrid cloud environments.

Learn more about the Gigamon and Zscaler integration.

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