This is part of a series in which I am reporting live from the floor of Zenith Live 2025, Zscaler’s user conference. As someone deeply immersed in healthcare cybersecurity, I’m here to help distill the deluge of product announcements into what really matters for hospitals, clinics, and health systems.This update focuses on Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) and four significant updates that go far beyond vanity metrics or buzzwords. If your users rely on EHRs, PACS, or cloud-based telehealth platforms, you’ll want to keep reading. Because what’s being introduced here doesn’t just improve IT observability—it directly impacts clinician efficiency and patient outcomes.Real User Monitoring (RUM): Finally, Visibility Inside the BrowserLet’s start with the browser. Not the firewall or the network path, but the browser window itself—where a physician clicks “Next” and then waits. And waits.RUM adds visibility into what’s happening after the request reaches the app and starts rendering in the browser. DOM content loading, core web vitals, slow-loading JavaScript—it’s all captured, without requiring an army of performance agents or monitoring every idle tab.Healthcare organizations often spend weeks trying to pinpoint why something like an ePrescribing app is sluggish in only one department. With RUM, you can see the details session by session, location by location, across browsers and devices. RUM pinpoints slow rendering on specific workstations, layout shifts caused by outdated browsers, or heavy third-party resources impacting clinical workflows.In a world where every second of lag can delay care or frustrate already burned-out staff, this level of insight isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a lifeline. Remote Remediation: Script First, Ask Questions LaterOne of the most frequent conversations in healthcare IT goes something like this: “It’s slow.” “Have you restarted?” “No.” “Can you?” “I’m with a patient.”Now imagine that, instead of relying on end-user compliance or help desk tag-teams, your IT team could remotely execute secure, signed scripts to clear caches, restart services, or apply fixes—all without interrupting the clinician mid-chart.Remote Remediation in ZDX makes this possible. And no, this isn’t the IT equivalent of pushing buttons and hoping for the best. Granular role-based access controls (RBAC) determine who can execute what. Disruptive scripts require user consent. You can even schedule remediation to wait until the device comes online or delay execution until after hours.For healthcare environments, this is a game-changer. It means faster recovery, fewer escalations, and less user friction. It also means IT teams can scale their impact without scaling burnout. Device Scoring: Know When to Upgrade or Just RebootYou wouldn’t give a cardiac patient a decade-old defibrillator. So why keep running mission-critical healthcare apps on hardware that’s falling behind?Device Scoring introduces a health index for endpoints that goes beyond CPU and memory stats. It considers historical usage trends, crash data, and hardware capabilities, then maps those against user behavior (light vs. power users). In short, it tells you which devices are under-provisioned, misused, or just plain overdue for replacement.Think of it as a wellness check for every endpoint. Dashboards show BSODs, software crashes, memory leaks, and battery decline—all mapped over time and across users, locations, and apps.This helps healthcare IT leaders make smarter refresh decisions, avoid surprise failures during patient consults, and track down root causes that otherwise might be written off as “intermittent user error.” Network Intelligence: Your Global MRI for Internet HealthIf RUM is the stethoscope, Network Intelligence is the MRI. This enhancement in ZDX gives healthcare IT teams visibility across the entire digital supply chain—from the clinician’s endpoint to the cloud application, and across last-mile ISPs, intermediate carriers, and data centers.It doesn’t just show you that something’s broken—it shows you where, how long it’s been happening, and whether other users are impacted. You get real-time maps of network performance by geography, ISP, and application. Baselines are automatically built from 28 days of historical data, and anomalies are flagged when latency or packet loss spikes.So, when your radiology team in Cincinnati says their PACS viewer is slow, you can verify whether it’s an ISP issue, a cloud routing problem, or something else entirely. And you can reroute traffic using Zscaler policies instead of waiting for a telecom provider to admit fault.This level of visibility is essential in healthcare, where data needs to move fast, securely, and reliably across highly distributed teams—whether they’re working in a hospital, at a rural clinic, or on a telehealth call with a home health nurse. Final Diagnosis: Proactive Healthcare IT Starts HereToo many healthcare IT teams are stuck in a break-fix cycle—reactive, understaffed, and always one step behind the next alert. With the new ZDX capabilities, Zscaler isn’t just improving observability—it’s giving you the tools to act.Whether it’s monitoring browser-side performance, automating secure fixes, identifying failing devices before they become help desk tickets, or mapping your network like a diagnostic scan, this is the kind of capability healthcare environments desperately need.Patient care doesn’t wait for a reboot. With ZDX, maybe it won’t have to.
[#item_full_content] This is part of a series in which I am reporting live from the floor of Zenith Live 2025, Zscaler’s user conference. As someone deeply immersed in healthcare cybersecurity, I’m here to help distill the deluge of product announcements into what really matters for hospitals, clinics, and health systems.This update focuses on Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) and four significant updates that go far beyond vanity metrics or buzzwords. If your users rely on EHRs, PACS, or cloud-based telehealth platforms, you’ll want to keep reading. Because what’s being introduced here doesn’t just improve IT observability—it directly impacts clinician efficiency and patient outcomes.Real User Monitoring (RUM): Finally, Visibility Inside the BrowserLet’s start with the browser. Not the firewall or the network path, but the browser window itself—where a physician clicks “Next” and then waits. And waits.RUM adds visibility into what’s happening after the request reaches the app and starts rendering in the browser. DOM content loading, core web vitals, slow-loading JavaScript—it’s all captured, without requiring an army of performance agents or monitoring every idle tab.Healthcare organizations often spend weeks trying to pinpoint why something like an ePrescribing app is sluggish in only one department. With RUM, you can see the details session by session, location by location, across browsers and devices. RUM pinpoints slow rendering on specific workstations, layout shifts caused by outdated browsers, or heavy third-party resources impacting clinical workflows.In a world where every second of lag can delay care or frustrate already burned-out staff, this level of insight isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a lifeline. Remote Remediation: Script First, Ask Questions LaterOne of the most frequent conversations in healthcare IT goes something like this: “It’s slow.” “Have you restarted?” “No.” “Can you?” “I’m with a patient.”Now imagine that, instead of relying on end-user compliance or help desk tag-teams, your IT team could remotely execute secure, signed scripts to clear caches, restart services, or apply fixes—all without interrupting the clinician mid-chart.Remote Remediation in ZDX makes this possible. And no, this isn’t the IT equivalent of pushing buttons and hoping for the best. Granular role-based access controls (RBAC) determine who can execute what. Disruptive scripts require user consent. You can even schedule remediation to wait until the device comes online or delay execution until after hours.For healthcare environments, this is a game-changer. It means faster recovery, fewer escalations, and less user friction. It also means IT teams can scale their impact without scaling burnout. Device Scoring: Know When to Upgrade or Just RebootYou wouldn’t give a cardiac patient a decade-old defibrillator. So why keep running mission-critical healthcare apps on hardware that’s falling behind?Device Scoring introduces a health index for endpoints that goes beyond CPU and memory stats. It considers historical usage trends, crash data, and hardware capabilities, then maps those against user behavior (light vs. power users). In short, it tells you which devices are under-provisioned, misused, or just plain overdue for replacement.Think of it as a wellness check for every endpoint. Dashboards show BSODs, software crashes, memory leaks, and battery decline—all mapped over time and across users, locations, and apps.This helps healthcare IT leaders make smarter refresh decisions, avoid surprise failures during patient consults, and track down root causes that otherwise might be written off as “intermittent user error.” Network Intelligence: Your Global MRI for Internet HealthIf RUM is the stethoscope, Network Intelligence is the MRI. This enhancement in ZDX gives healthcare IT teams visibility across the entire digital supply chain—from the clinician’s endpoint to the cloud application, and across last-mile ISPs, intermediate carriers, and data centers.It doesn’t just show you that something’s broken—it shows you where, how long it’s been happening, and whether other users are impacted. You get real-time maps of network performance by geography, ISP, and application. Baselines are automatically built from 28 days of historical data, and anomalies are flagged when latency or packet loss spikes.So, when your radiology team in Cincinnati says their PACS viewer is slow, you can verify whether it’s an ISP issue, a cloud routing problem, or something else entirely. And you can reroute traffic using Zscaler policies instead of waiting for a telecom provider to admit fault.This level of visibility is essential in healthcare, where data needs to move fast, securely, and reliably across highly distributed teams—whether they’re working in a hospital, at a rural clinic, or on a telehealth call with a home health nurse. Final Diagnosis: Proactive Healthcare IT Starts HereToo many healthcare IT teams are stuck in a break-fix cycle—reactive, understaffed, and always one step behind the next alert. With the new ZDX capabilities, Zscaler isn’t just improving observability—it’s giving you the tools to act.Whether it’s monitoring browser-side performance, automating secure fixes, identifying failing devices before they become help desk tickets, or mapping your network like a diagnostic scan, this is the kind of capability healthcare environments desperately need.Patient care doesn’t wait for a reboot. With ZDX, maybe it won’t have to.
