Innovations worth watching: CXO Exchange key takeaways

While flooding in Valencia and its aftermath kept us from meeting in person, we once again charged on with a virtual CXO Exchange that was nevertheless packed with valuable insights into zero trust innovations and advancements helping to transform businesses. Here are a few of my biggest takeaways from another exciting Exchange.

Zscaler CEO, Founder, and Chairman Jay Chaudhry set the scene with a keynote address on the state of the cyber threat landscape before detailing major Zscaler innovations. He noted how cyber has entered the scope of every executive and board member, not just the CISO. Jay emphasized how generative AI (Gen AI) tools like ChatGPT are making it easier for cybercriminals to identify vulnerabilities and conduct sophisticated phishing attacks.

He explained his vision for founding Zscaler as an attempt to stop threat actors across the four main stages of the attack chain: finding the attack surface, compromising a system, lateral movement within the network, and data exfiltration. 

Today, Zscaler continues to innovate how zero trust is applied by: 

• Minimizing the attack surface by eliminating public IP addresses so organizations’ attack surfaces remain invisible to the public internet.

• Preventing compromise by routing traffic through a proxy architecture capable of conducting TLS inspection.

• Blocking lateral movement by treating each branch office, factory, and facility like an internet cafe, routing traffic direct to the internet without the need for expensive MPLS connections or complex routing.

• Stopping data leaks from Gen AI applications, cloud misconfigurations, malicious insiders, and other avenues due to its unique, inline position for traffic monitoring. 

Each of these capabilities is made possible by Zscaler’s unique zero trust architecture, not a series of cobbled-together features developed in silos or through serial acquisition. All product innovations pursued by Zscaler strengthen and expand its capabilities in the four categories above.

The Zscaler platform: “Middleware for the Cloud”

Dhawal Sharma, EVP, Products & Product Strategy joined Jay to discuss how the Zscaler platform allows organizations to make use of the expansive capabilities of Zscaler’s flagship solutions: Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), Zscaler Private Access (ZPA), Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX). 

Through a common API endpoint called One API, Zscaler has simplified policy management and analytics gathering, all digestible through a single easy-to-use user interface known as the Zscaler Experience Center. (Be sure to watch the video for a guided tour of the new interface.)

The interface allows admins with the proper permissions to discover IoT/OT devices active in your environment, monitor and configure access policies, measure TLS encrypted traffic, and more. This powerful platform is augmented by the new Zscaler Copilot, an AI assistant that simplifies troubleshooting for IT teams by greatly reducing the mean time to detection and mean time to resolution of user issues.

Maximizing executive impact with the CXO mobile app

CXOs will be especially interested in the capabilities offered by Zscaler’s newly rereleased CXO mobile app. Designed in collaboration with customer CISOs and CIOs, the app simplifies and centralizes metrics critical to IT and security leaders including their organization’s overall risk profile, network traffic, and user experience. 

These insights are powerful in assisting decision-making such as concrete steps for managing cyber risk, what locations and applications are not being fully utilized, and where users’ experience is being impacted. The app is available and ready to empower CXOs with data-driven insights simply by contacting your Zscaler administrator. 

Chief Security Officer Deepen Desai joined the demonstration to explain how he uses the app in Zscaler’s own corporate environment. Not surprisingly his focus is on Zscaler’s overall risk score. He explained he is interested in changes to the score and the factors contributing to the change. True to the company’s core focus area, the app demonstrates how Zscaler itself is doing in minimizing attack surface, preventing compromise, eliminating the possibility for lateral movement, and stopping data exfiltration, with metrics in each category benchmarked against industry peers.

A growing emphasis on data protection

The increasing threat of ransomware and continued adoption of Gen AI tools are forcing organizations to sharpen their focus on data protection. Effective data protection requires capabilities in a number of disciplines, and it’s often entrusted to a litany of vendors, making it expensive and complicated to manage. 

Zscaler’s unique inline position allows for the inspection of all traffic for malicious activity, including TLS-encrypted traffic, meaning the underlying architecture can be applied regardless of where data resides, from the cloud to BYOD, whether at rest or in motion.

Importantly, this holistic approach to data loss prevention allows organizations to retire point products – by opting for pixel-streaming browser isolation in favor of complex VDIs, for example – and the complexity they introduce. 

Tying it all together with Unified Vulnerability Management

Security teams today are often bogged down by the tools meant to protect them from rising cyber threats. Network scanners, application scanners, endpoint scanners, firewall scanners – these all create a stream of noise without the resources to parse them or prioritize their signals.

Raj Krishna, SVP, Product New Initiatives, demonstrated how Zscaler is helping organizations cut through that noise. By leveraging inline data from the world’s largest security cloud and now an AI data fabric informed by dozens of third party sources. For example, by correlating data from a host of sources, we will assign a critical risk score to an asset that:

• Is considered mission critical,

• Is vulnerable to a CVE we’ve seen exploited in the wild,

• And is no longer running a relevant compensating control.

When critical risks are identified, Zscaler “outigrations” can automatically push tickets to services like Jira and ServiceNow for rapid remediation. This risk-based approach to vulnerability management helps security teams triage threats, preserving scarce resources. 

We hope to see you next time

The CXO Exchange was a comprehensive showcase of Zscaler’s leadership in IT and cybersecurity innovation, only a sampling of which I’ve been able to cover here. You can watch the full recording here, or better yet, experience a CXO Experience for yourself by registering to join us in Fort Lauderdale on February 20-21 or Lisbon on April 10-11.