Welcome to the future where the combination of generative AI and zero trust is the new black in cybersecurity. This week, Zscaler took the stage at Zenith Live 2023 to showcase its ambitious growth plans, aiming to upsell and cross-sell new cybersecurity services on its cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange™ (ZTX) platform.
And, of course, they’re not alone in this race. CrowdStrike recently introduced Charlotte AI, its generative AI cybersecurity analyst. Google Cloud Security AI Workbench and Microsoft Security Copilot also offer generative AI-assisted cybersecurity solutions. Even Palo Alto Networks’ CEO Nikesh Arora has spoken about the “significant opportunity” to embed generative AI into their products and workflows.
But enough about the competition, let’s talk about Zscaler’s vision, shall we?
The Generative AI Buzz in the Boardroom
Zscaler’s keynote dove right into a hot topic among customers: the threat of internal data leaking into publicly available LLM models. Remember the Samsung engineers who fed sensitive data into ChatGPT? That little slip-up led to board-level discussions about generative AI-based technologies at various companies.
Alex Phillips, CIO at National Oilwell Varco (NOV), has been educating his board on the advantages and risks of ChatGPT and generative AI. This ongoing process sets expectations and puts guardrails in place to prevent Samsung-like leaks from happening.
Zscaler’s CTO, Syam Nair, addressed the audience’s concerns: “How do I ensure that I protect that data? I protect the data from being used as well as its intellectual property that will not be used in terms of training models in the public domain. This is where zero trust and the need for zero trust for AI applications comes into being.”
Zscaler’s Generative AI, Zero Trust, and Revenue Multiplier Dreams
Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry emphasized the importance of ZTX’s globally distributed cloud and zero-trust connectivity. The company plans to capitalize on the telemetry data that ZTX manages daily for its customers, providing in-depth business insights, reporting, and new services.
Chaudhry proudly shared that Zscaler has invested $1.7 billion in R&D, working on next-generation AI projects while keeping up with existing platforms and solutions. This week, they introduced four new solutions at Zenith Live, including Zscaler Risk360 and Zero Trust Branch Connectivity.
Zscaler’s Business Insights: A Glimpse into the Future
Chaudhry highlighted the company’s focus on Business Insights, which seeks to provide CISOs, CIOs, and security and risk management professionals with summarized risk data for better decision-making. Zscaler’s Risk360 platform aims to integrate internal and external data sources, capture insights from over 100 data-driven factors, and offer risk quantification, visualization, reporting, and suggested remediation actions.
Sneak Peeks of Zscaler’s Future AI Plans
Zscaler also previewed three generative AI products and services under development, including Security AutoPilot with breach prediction, Zscaler Navigator, and Multi-Modal DLP. The company aims to capitalize on the large volumes of telemetry data managed by its ZTX platform to fine-tune secure large language models (LLMs), improve breach prediction, and drive new product development.
Deepen Desai, Zscaler’s global CISO and VP of security research and operations, shared the company’s approach to AI and ML strategies. Desai emphasized the focus on reducing data latency with more real-time threats and monitoring data, while also addressing data delays caused by siloed systems.
Insider Threat Protection: A Boon for DevOps
Desai and his team’s efforts to protect the Zscaler build environment have crossover benefits for the product DevOps teams, particularly in protecting against insider threats. Desai uses decoys extensively across Active Directory and sensitive environments to identify potential insider threat activity, with the lessons learned enriching Zscaler’s products.
In conclusion, Zscaler’s aggressive growth strategy and focus on generative AI and zero trust appear to be the company’s ticket to a bright future in the cybersecurity industry. And with the ever-evolving threat landscape, it’s clear that innovation will always be a top priority for these tech titans.
