Zscaler inspects your traffic at one of its global Zscaler Enforcement Nodes. ALLOD inspects it inline, on infrastructure you own, without ever handing it to a vendor's cloud.
| Dimension | ALLOD | Zscaler |
|---|---|---|
| Where inspection happens | Inline, on your own infrastructure | Backhauled to one of 150+ Zscaler-operated ZENs globally |
| Vendor access to traffic | None - no vendor infrastructure in the path | Zscaler's cloud terminates and inspects every connection |
| Vendor jurisdiction | Allod Solutions AB, Sweden | Zscaler, Inc., US-incorporated, subject to CLOUD Act or FISA 702 |
| Scale / threat telemetry | Your own environment plus MISP threat feed integration | 250 billion+ daily transactions across its global customer base |
| Feature scope | Firewall, DLP, CASB, ZTNA | Full SSE suite - SWG, CASB, ZTNA, DLP, browser isolation |
| Operational model | You deploy and run it | Fully managed cloud service |
Zscaler's scale is real - and so is the fact that every byte passes through a US-incorporated vendor's cloud to get it. Which one matters more depends on what you're protecting against.
150+ global enforcement points and a massive shared threat telemetry base are genuinely hard to replicate self-hosted. If your priority is global reach and vendor-managed scale, that's a legitimate reason to pick a cloud-proxy platform.
Zscaler, Inc. can be legally compelled under the CLOUD Act or FISA 702 to disclose data it processes, wherever its nodes sit. That's a property of the corporate structure, not the quality of the product.
Self-hosting means there's no cloud to subpoena and no foreign jurisdiction question to answer for the inspection layer itself. The trade-off is that your team runs the infrastructure instead of Zscaler's.
At one of its 150+ global Zscaler Enforcement Nodes, where traffic is terminated and inspected before being forwarded on. That inspection happens on Zscaler's cloud, not the customer's.
Inline, on infrastructure the customer owns and operates. Traffic never leaves the customer's environment - there's no vendor-operated node in the path.
Zscaler, Inc. is US-incorporated, so it can be legally compelled under the CLOUD Act or FISA 702 to disclose data it processes, regardless of where its nodes are physically located. This describes the architecture, not Zscaler's security practices.
Its global network and threat telemetry (250B+ daily transactions) plus a fully managed model remove the operational burden of running your own inspection infrastructure. For organisations without strict sovereignty requirements, that's a legitimate trade-off.
Book a 30-minute demo - we'll walk through deploying inline inspection on your own infrastructure.