Zscaler Exec Insights app reboot boosts functionality and user experience

Think about the mobile apps you use on a daily basis. What do they have in common? Are they useful and informative? Convenient, valuable, and inspiring? Other qualities may also come to mind. Cracking the code so those attributes define a vendor's enterprise app that technologists in the C-suite can regularly pull up on their smartphones is no small feat. What does it take to make a mobile app that our customers would say, "I want to wake up every morning and look at it?"

There’s a lot that goes into making an enterprise mobile app successful in 2025, but those like the Zscaler Executive Insights App are on the right path.

Last November, Zscaler launched a new version with the goal of unifying security, risk, and digital experience metrics. The app now shows how Zscaler products protect organizations against relevant high-profile threats. That customization increases the value of the app for time-strapped CXOs on the go. They can compare their organization's security posture to peers, get alerts on emerging threats, and use free access to Risk360 (the standard version) to quantify the potential financial loss tied to risks and what to do about it.

Zscaler Executive Insights App unifies three pillars of digital transformation

View summary-level information, key data points, and valuable insights into your enterprise IT operational performance and security posture.

Last month, Zscaler leaders held a feedback session about the app with customers at the CXO Exchange in Fort Lauderdale. The session was led by Zscaler's Chief Security Officer Deepen Desai and Dhawal Sharma, who is the EVP & Head of Product Strategy. They explained that the cybersecurity newsfeed in a users app now also shows if you have protection against it via your Zscaler solutions. This helps to answer the top question any CXO would want to know: What's the top high-profile threat in my environment?

Zscaler is in the middle of all the activity that egresses a customer’s environment. If there’s a failure on your endpoint control side, we will see it, according to the executives. The app can therefore consolidate key data in one place, delivering timely updates concisely. That helps leaders make fast, informed decisions or pick up on signals that may or may not be on their teams’ radars. The goal is to provide up-to-the-minute situational awareness.

Executive users may not care about the latest adware or spyware, but something big like Log4j or the SolarWinds attack makes the CEO and boardroom worry. CXOs want to know immediately if they are seeing it in their environment and, if so, if it is getting blocked. They need to know if they need to take any action and be able to convey the situation to their superiors.

CISOs could use the app to drill down into an anomalous spike in their environment over a desired period of time, such as the previous month or week and investigate the causes. They can find out if it belongs in an advanced threat category like phishing, malicious content, or botnet callback and begin to baseline the figures and take appropriate action.
 
One customer emphasized how the app can help their team be more proactive once threats pop up. “Once we see any suspicious activity I can immediately engage my team to learn what we're doing about it. And if our controls are working, ask, ‘what else can be done’? This can lead to actions like enabling Sandbox, for instance, to flag a certain type of threat that may be involved a zero day payload that leads to an exploit.”

The analytics piece in the app also saw an upgrade. Users automatically get subscribed to the standard version of Risk360 to help decide which specific actions should be prioritized to have the best impact on cyber risk. Beyond cyberthreats, the app also covers events that impact the end-user experience, such as application and network outages. The app shows how many application-, network- and device-centric incidents you had over a select period. The development team is adding more context to this view, such as by each region to show which applications had issues and how many users were impacted.

Speaking of a roadmap, the CXO session covered feedback on what the future could hold for the Executive Insights App. The group discussed app notifications based on Zscaler research team findings that could‌ be harmful, anomalous occurrences in a customer’s environment, or a zero-day alert. Notifications could include a link to a research note with information about how a customer is protected against the threats.

Elsewhere, potential functionality in the news section could include recommendations if a customer has no protection or partial protection. The group also discussed ways to provide customization for different personas, the integration of third-party data sources, and visualizations such as countries where the greatest threats are coming from, including an aggregated view by type of threats.

There is no shortage of ideas for evolving the app. With the right design that focuses on people and makes it easy to use, it will soon be an indispensable tool for all Zscaler executive customers.

Learn more and view setup instructions.