Essential innovations from our recent Virtual CXO Exchange

CXO Exchanges are opportunities for Zscaler leaders to showcase the fruits of their day-to-day efforts for an audience of executive practitioners, with a special focus on how these advancements can move the needle for businesses. While we regret not being able to join current and future customer leaders in Miami last week, we have made a donation on behalf of the CXO community to relief efforts for those affected. 

Those who were able to join us virtually learned about exciting developments in streamlining IT environments, simplified security administration, more effective risk management, holistic data protection, and more. 

Here’s what most excites me after our most recent Virtual CXO Exchange.

Zero trust can deliver greater security and cost savings

Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry set the stage with a deep dive into zero trust architecture, including how simplifying the environment can stop attackers across the four most common steps in the attack chain.

Routers, switches, east/west firewalls, load balancers…the list of appliances that can be eliminated by a zero trust transformation is long. Add total cost of ownership when factoring in admin, maintenance, and the periodic upgrades needed to ensure everything runs smoothly – multiplied by the 60-80 point products in place for an average enterprise – and it’s easy to see costs getting out of hand.

Eliminating point products and their complexity is just one source of savings. Effective security can result in cost savings in its own right. In fact, my colleague, Raj Krishna, SVP, Product New Initiatives, shared that one Zscaler customer was able to demonstrate sufficient security controls to reduce their organization’s cyber insurance premium by an amount that exceeded their annual spend with Zscaler. 

The unified Zscaler dashboard will transform security administration

As many of you know, the Zscaler platform is an expansive set of capabilities based on the core function of offering secure internet access for users, workloads, and devices. The Zscaler Experience Center is envisioned as a single console for all Zscaler products, making it simpler for IT and security teams to realize the full benefits of the platform.

From this centralized management console, admins will be able to oversee the comprehensive networking, cybersecurity, digital experience, and copilot solutions offered by Zscaler. 

As Dhawal Sharma, EVP, Products & Product Strategy, explained, benefits for admins include:

• Reduced deployment friction – Persona-based accounts allow for the easy provisioning of granular RBAC rules that, for example, distinguish between a cybersecurity persona and a helpdesk persona. Admins can also set usage policies a single time and apply them across personas for maximally efficient deployments. 
• Operational simplicity – Features like IoT discovery and app usage measurements instantly provide admins with valuable data on attack surface and data flows. This information can be used to monitor the health of the customer zero trust environment, remove silos across management personas, and help to more quickly address issues.
• Enhanced AI assistance – One copilot with domain expertise across all personas will assist with human-language responses to queries covering troubleshooting, information about the customer environment, policies, and more. This feature will become increasingly useful as copilots become the new UI for administrators.

Holistic risk quantification tools will empower CXOs like never before 

Zscaler Risk360, our solution for cyber risk quantification headed by Raj Krishna, provides a combination of risk exposure metrics and concrete recommendations for remediation. Both are essential. Abundant telemetry allows Zscaler to tailor alerts to threats being exploited in the wild, attribute to specific threat actors, and implement AI-recommended steps for addressing threats.

This executive-focused app distills information about the IT environment down to the essentials for CXOs like overall organizational risk exposure, user experience score, and networking footprint. It’s a one-stop-shop for the high-level insights including (via a redesigned news feature) a simplified way for CXOs to know if their organization is protected from threats making headlines based on Zscaler solution licenses and deployment numbers.

AI, meet deception

Zscaler deception technology is one of the most exciting aspects of our cyber defense capabilities and it continues to grow in terms of functionality. For instance, as Zscaler CSO Deepen Desai explained, we have created a honeypot-like LLM that exists to detect the malicious exfiltration of data by users who believe they are entering inputs into a commercially available AI assistant. We have consistently heard from CXOs concerns about how these tools are being used, and this deception application can help to ensure they can be used, but not abused. 

On the subject of data loss…

Preventing data loss is a core concern for the majority of enterprises today, especially those dealing in cutting-edge intellectual property. Add to that the fact that there are more avenues for facilitating data loss than ever, including the LLM example mentioned above, but also multi-cloud environments, the proliferation of SaaS tools, innumerable APIs and the like. 

That’s why Moinul Khan, SVP, Product Management and team have been working for more than six years to create the most comprehensive, fully-integrated data security solution for Zscaler customers, so organizations do not need to deal with six different DLP tools that introduce mass complexity.

The results are a DLP solution that protects both structured and unstructured data; data at rest and data in motion; data residing in the cloud, on the endpoint, and in email; data for corporate managed and DLP devices. These DLP solutions are powered by extensive AI capabilities capable of categorizing data (even on the endpoint), pinpointing misconfigurations, and yes, the loss of sensitive data via LLMs like ChatGPT.

High standards for high availability

This summer’s CrowdStrike outage highlighted the importance of cloud reliability in the global economy. As a mission-critical service, Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange is designed with resilience at its heart. 

Zscaler Chief Reliability Officer Misha Kuperman said it best, “High availability is about more than infrastructure. It's about people, process, and technology.” That’s why Zscaler is honing a company-wide focus on availability by:

• Putting security and stability first when developing new capabilities, aiming for 99.999% availability.
• Expanding QA, testing, and observability to establish a mean time to detect of less than five minutes.
• Overhauling tech debt with future-proof and reliable design so as to achieve a mean time remediate of less than 15 minutes.

Finally, as a call to action to our customers, please reach out to Zscaler for assistance in ensuring you have a robust BC/DR plan in place. As Misha likes to say, “Hope is not a plan.”
 

These are simply a few of my key takeaways from our recent Virtual CXO Exchange. If you are interested, I hope you will take the time to watch a session in its entirety.