In my previous blog, I was proud to share that Zscaler was nominated for two awards from the Microsoft community, including the Zero Trust Champion of the year. On May 12, Microsoft announced the award winners at its 20/20 Partner Awards ceremony, a prestigious event recognizing industry excellence in a number of key areas.

I couldn’t be more grateful to the Microsoft community to announce that Zscaler has won the Zero Trust Champion of the Year award, beating out a strong field of competitors. This award validates our forward-looking vision and the significant innovation behind our zero trust architecture, which is reimagining how leading enterprises safeguard their digital business in today’s mobile and cloud-first world. This recognition comes on the heels of the landmark Executive Order on Federal Cybersecurity from the Biden Administration that puts zero trust at the forefront of both public and private efforts to transform security to become more agile, resilient, and significantly reduce risk.

We believe wholeheartedly in three fundamental principles of zero trust:

Zero trust has generated a massive amount of noise across the industry for good reason—it’s the only way to disrupt the attack equation and get ahead of highly intelligent, rapidly evolving adversaries. With users, data, and applications everywhere, there needs to be a different approach; one that is cloud-native, optimized for the needs of the modern enterprise, and adaptable to the ever-changing threat landscape. Zscaler believes a true zero trust architecture must be built on the following three tenets:

Zero network access: connect users to apps, not corporate networks to prevent lateral movement.
Zero attack surface: make apps invisible so they can’t be attacked.
Zero passthrough connections: deny all privileges; utilize a proxy architecture for better cyberthreat prevention and data protection.

It has become evident that legacy network security architectures can’t deliver on the promise of zero trust, as adapting traditional solutions to this new era introduces massive complexity and cost without improving security. The Microsoft Zero Trust Champion of the Year award recognizes Zscaler’s approach to delivering a comprehensive zero trust architecture, one made all the more meaningful by being selected by the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) members who were solely responsible for voting on this year’s winners.

Together with Microsoft, we will continue to deliver exceptional security outcomes to our customers, built on a foundation of the industry’s leading zero trust architecture, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. Thank you to the MISA members and Microsoft for this honor. Recognition amongst our peers in the industry is humbling, and we are grateful for your confidence in our strategy and execution of providing zero trust to our customers.

Don’t miss our joint breakout session at Zenith Live

In a few weeks, Zscaler will be hosting its virtual Zenith Live conference, with this year’s theme being Full Cloud Ahead. In our joint session, you will hear from experts at Zscaler and Microsoft about actionable cloud-based zero trust solutions and crucial strategies to stay ahead of today’s most advanced threats. Our experts will discuss the strategies and technologies required for a true zero trust architecture and how you can make zero trust a reality for your organization.

We hope to see you there!

Thank you again to Microsoft and the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association for this opportunity and recognition.