Trailblazing innovations that revolutionize Data Protection

This blog is a summary of Zscaler's new Innovation Launch around Data Protection.  To watch the virtual event and see all the new innovations in action, see the Launch Event Page

A Unifed Approach to Securing Data

Today’s new innovations announced around Zscaler’s Data Protection platform are important steps in the next phase of data security. Organizations are thirsty for smarter, better, and more streamlined approaches to data protection. With that, Security Service Edge (SSE) has been the fastest growing security architecture of the last 10 years, so it’s clear that cloud consolidation of data protection is here to stay.

But why is it that the gold standard for data protection is now consumed from an SSE Cloud? It starts with three little letters: DLP. Often confused with Data Protection, DLP is the underlying technology where all the magic happens, as its main goal is to find and classify data as sensitive or not. Any data protection team knows that DLP is the heartbeat of their program. Once you have your DLP policies in place, the next logical step is to send it hunting for data. This is where the platform comes into play. It should bring everything together and secure as many channels as possible, like web, endpoint, email, SaaS, IaaS, private apps, and BYOD.

As you read about all our new Data Protection innovations, you’ll quickly understand that Zscaler has been squarely focused on extending their industry leading platform in new ways that fundamentally helps supercharge DLP. With these new approaches to data protection, protection teams can improve visibility, control, and context more than ever before, so sensitive data and risks can be better controlled

Let’s see what all the fuss is about with these new innovations:

Innovation 1: More AI Auto Data Discovery

In 2022, Zscaler announced an industry-first innovation around inline auto data discovery. Leveraging AI/ML, Zscaler’s cloud was able to quickly and accurately classify data as it moved through an organization's Zscaler tenant and interactively provide guidance on where it was going and who was putting it at risk. This enabled the organization to drastically accelerate deployments by understanding their data landscape with tremendous speed right out of the box.

Building on this innovation, Zscaler has now scaled AI/ML auto data discovery to endpoints and public clouds (via our DSPM). This further extends data protection teams ability to understand even more data risks across devices, inline and clouds. With complete visibility, it becomes even easier for organizations to enforce meaningful protections that will keep data safe.

Innovation 2: Data Security Posture Management

DSPM is one of the hottest new technologies out there and many vendors and organizations are starting to take notice. Built to help organizations understand the data risks associated with misconfigured public clouds, DSPM is an important step to help improve data hygiene across AWS, Azure, and GCP. But it must be asked: Where should DSPM be consumed from?

At its core, DSPM is about understanding where your sensitive data is and what risks it is exposed to. In addition to understanding misconfigurations, a great DLP engine is core to this exercise. For data protection teams that are using their centralized DLP to protect endpoint, email, and SaaS; adding public cloud to this is a no brainer. This ensures you get consistent alerts on data as it moves through the organization. For example, data downloaded from AWS, attached to an email, and uploaded to Google Drive to share should all be inspected and blocked by the same DLP engine. With SSE now the de facto standard from which Data Protection and DLP should be consumed, adding DSPM to this equation makes a ton of sense. This allows Data Protection teams to round out their protection landscape to new channels with existing policies, while understanding what risky public misconfigurations need attention.

Zscaler's DSPM deliver all of this on all fronts. With an integrated approach to data protection, organizations get complete control over their public cloud data and configurations. Quickly auto discover shadow data and understand all misconfigurations attached to this data that expose it to risk. After risk is understood, in-depth remmediation help IT teams quickly close gaps and secure all public cloud data. Best of all Data Protection teams can easily add this to their existing DLP policies, so deployment is a snap.

Zscaler DSPM Dashboard - Data and Exposure Visibility

Innovation 3: GenAI Security

The hottest IT challenge on the planet right now is GenAI applications. As a shadow IT app on steroids, these new GenAI apps have the ability to drive significant productivity, but at what cost? Scared of the data loss potential, many organizations are flat out blocking all of these apps, which is understandable. With this challenge in mind, Zscaler has released powerful new capabilities that enable IT organizations to get maximum visibility into the use of these AI apps so as to make better blocking decisions. Centralized around a new dashboard, Zscaler reveals everything you need in one place for great data protection. From AI usage, to peer comparison, to in-depth understanding of all data loss, this dashboard enables teams to quickly understand AI risks.

But the real power of this approach is seeing the actual input prompts that users are sending to AI applications. For every user you can see the AI app they are using, the input prompt they sent to the App, and what type of data was in that prompt. This is contextual visibility at its best, so you can make better blocking decisions. With Zscaler you can then enforce DLP inspection to block sensitive content or even isolate users and AI apps in our secure cloud browser.

Zscaler Gen AI Security - App Usage Visibility

Zscaler Gen AI Security - In-depth visibility of user input prompts

Innovation 4: Email DLP

Email is one of the most dangerous channels for data loss. It’s extremely easy to attach data to emails and purposely or accidentally send them in risky ways. New to Zscalers platform is the ability to do real-time inspection of email via SMTP relay. Delivered as a Smarthost, Zscaler can now be easily inserted into organizations email infrastructure as an additional hop. It works with existing MTAs and gives you DLP actions like Caution, Block, Quarantine, Encrypt, or even Custom Headers. The best part is it seamlessly integrates with Zscaler’s centralized DLP, so all your existing policies and engines can be quickly scaled into email to inspect content and attachments for sensitive data risks. This enables organizations to further consolidate around SSE and reduce the cost and complexity of existing point product email solutions.

Innovation 5: Unified SaaS Security

Securing SaaS Platforms can often be a tricky task. Sometimes overlooked, these platforms need special care and attention as tons of business data resides in platforms like Office 365 or Google. Up until now there were several disjointed approaches needed to accomplish SaaS Security. CASB allows you to control risk sharing and SSPM enables you to scan for dangerous misconfigurations. To manage risky integrations of third-party apps organizations have had to look to SaaS Supply Chain Security.

To help organizations bring this all together and drive better correlation, Zscaler has released Unified SaaS Security. This new approach consolidates everything you need into on platform and workflow, so you can manage and secure all aspects of your SaaS Security. With CASB, SSPM and SaaS Supply chain integrated into one single approach, organizations get the complete visibility and correlation they need to make better risk decisions around these important SaaS Platform.

Bring it all together

As you can see, Zscaler has doubled down in several areas to help further extend the industry's most comprehensive Data Protection Platform. With one platform you can easily inspect structured and unstructured data, across data in motion, at rest and in use, across all the channels you need to properly secure all your data. The power of this platform helps you find data faster, secure data better, and retire legacy technical debt around one consolidated approach.

If you’re ready to see how Zscaler can help you transform your data protection strategy, we’d love to hear from you or tell you more. Here are a couple options:

• Innovation Launch: Watch our launch event and see all these innovations up close and personal
• Deep-Dive Breakouts: If you want to double click on any innovation or explore resources, you can see several breakouts around AI, DSPM, SSPM and Email
• Learn about Data Protection: Explore our Data Protection Solution
• Talk to someone: Reach out to us to get a demo or see if Zscaler may be right for your organization