Unveiling The Future: Exploring Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange In Cybersecurity

Sydney Neely Hello, I'm Sydney Neely with The Channel Company. The world of cybersecurity is rapidly evolving, forcing solution providers to constantly evaluate their offerings to clients. Zscaler’s innovations in zero trust security are designed to help partners succeed with a powerful single-vendor framework. Joining me to tell us more is Dhawal Sharma, the senior vice president of Product Management. Hi, Dhawal! Now you speak with so many customers daily. What challenges do they face today and how is Zscaler stepping in to help them succeed in the current environment? Dhawal Sharma So majority of our customers or enterprises are going through what they call as network transformation or digital transformation projects which drive these transformations across network security application landscape. Our customers have been working with us to help them enable these transformation at a rapid pace. In order to go through these transformations, our customers have to deal with their legacy architectures and moving to more modern architectures where they can adopt cloud based technologies and SaaS services while not worrying about how security is working in the background. This is where Zscaler introduced our Zero Trust Exchange about a decade ago, and we took a very platform centric approach to this problem by building a platform on which our customers can start by replacing their traditional network appliances like proxies and firewalls. And over a period of time, they can move to a more modern architecture, where security followers the user. We extended this platform to help them navigate problems around transforming security not just for the employees, but third party contractors, workloads, OT, IOT as well. So in general, we are helping organizations move faster into the cloud, align with their business objectives, such as margin and acquisitions and divestitures, as well as adopting new technologies. Sydney Neely How is Zscaler shaking up the market? What's coming up? Dhawal Sharma We have been a very platform centric company. If you have followed our evolution. We actually have built products that are big on the same core platform that we introduced when we started the company. So we started with a focus on simplifying web security, but then over a period of time evolved into a full zero trust exchange which looks at Internet traffic, product traffic, SaaS application traffic, and expanded that not just for traffic that is coming from your employees, but also from workloads and in the public cloud and data center, OT and IOT. So in a way we became a switchboard between any traffic distinct from any source going towards any destination. Our platform handles more than 350 billion transactions every day, generating 5 trillion signals. We are using that telemetry to build more analytical products, things like Risk 360, which is a cyber risk quantification, service and business insights, which is focused on CIOs and CEOs of the company are at least some examples of the products that we have introduced in the market. Sydney Neely Speaking of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, why does the industry need to shift to a cybersecurity platform approach versus point products for security? Dhawal Sharma There are few reasons for it. So first and foremost, the security practitioner started by buying best in grade security tools like firewalls, proxies, then putting them in a service chain mode where your Internet bound traffic will go through them. As SaaS services became popular, as users started working outside the office they have to backhaul that traffic, that compromise user experience so cloud security was needed. Now, if you have a lot of point to siloed tools used when you are looking at that traffic, you lose the single pane of glass or context that you need to do security in an effective manner. This is where Zscaler built a platform where all the controls could be applied in the same time from a cybersecurity perspective, so nothing bad can come into your network or devices and nothing good can leak out.