Executives outline Zscaler core focus areas at Zenith Live

Zscaler is committed to fostering a free and open dialogue with our customers. Candid conversation with the C-suite helps shine a light on the areas that matter most to our customers, such as balancing company growth with maintaining a laser focus on customers.

As a part of this effort, our chief executive, chief technology officer, chief revenue officer, and chief customer success officer took questions from CXO customers at Zenith Live in Las Vegas last week.

I wanted to take a moment to provide some of my own key takeaways. While not product announcements themselves, these are the themes that tend to steer them, so I think they are important to share.

Customers demand transparency – in the product and beyond

Ongoing innovation is essential to keeping customers happy, but all the capabilities in the world won’t matter much if they’re not consumable by resource-strapped IT and security teams. 

For example, at Zenith Live, we received a wealth of positive feedback on the new data sources we are now able to synthesize following the acquisition of Avalor. Users want close integration of this data into apps like Risk360 and our breach prediction copilot. 

The same holds true for Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), which Chief Customer Success Officer Steven McMahon has deployed for his own teams to make sure the product delivers maximum insights and observability within Zscaler. Becoming “customer zero” is an essential tactic for ensuring user-centricity at Zscaler.

Zscaler CEO & Founder Jay Chaudhry stressed the importance of collaborating with product leaders to fast-track the back-end data streams customers would like to see feeding dashboards like Risk360. Users can expect account teams and product teams to be open about features, timelines, and limitations they can expect to encounter when customizing a solution.

“Good, candid conversation is always a good thing,” he said.

Zscaler Chief Revenue Officer and President of Global Sales Mike Rich drove this point home with respect to partner relationships. "There's a journey and it takes collaboration between us and our partners. That means having some sort of success roadmap built out because the partner oftentimes is a lot closer to your business," he said.

There's an art to the acquisition

Call it a corollary to the first concern. Customers are curious about the strategy behind our acquisitions, and not just in terms of the overall business. They want to know what capabilities will be integrated into our products, when, and how. Because rarely does introducing a new console make a CXO’s life any easier.

The recent acquisitions of Avalor and Airgap significantly enhanced Zscaler signal analysis and zero trust segmentation capabilities, respectively. But, as our customers know, these are meaningless if not integrated into flagship solutions like Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access.

Zscaler ensures this ability to integrate by prioritizing early-stage startups built on strong core technology, not bloated businesses with large user bases and a broad range of service offerings. These can be challenging to map onto another mature organization’s long-term strategy. 

As Zscaler CTO Syam Nair put it, "We want to be very intentional in terms of not creating additional tech debt." This involves synthesizing back-end management and API integration to ensure an effective product that can be seamlessly managed. 

"Our goal is to make sure customers have the most efficient interface they need to get the job done right," Nair said.

Prediction without remediation is pointless

Just as users demand that visibility accompanies new capabilities, simplified management should extend to remediation. 

Zscaler’s best-in-class secure web gateway and inline positioning mean we have access to rich telemetry that can tip a would-be hacker’s hand. Reconnaissance activity almost always precedes a breach, and those activities follow tell-tale patterns. 

But there is a fine line between making policy recommendations based on known attack tactics and allowing the agent to take unilateral action. The latter introduces the risk of false positives that can hinder the business rather than enable it. 

The breach prediction capabilities Zscaler is currently piloting earn high marks in terms of accuracy, and we will continue to refine their ability to deliver tailored policy recommendations based on observations from other environments. Nair describes this as an “intent-based” approach that, due to our visibility over traffic patterns, allows Zscaler to warn customers of the possibility of impending attack based on patterns observed in previous attacks. 

Business continuity is our number one priority

As Jay reminded the audience, “It takes a lot of time to build credibility, and you can lose it in 10 minutes.”

At a time of sustained growth and fast-paced innovation, how does Zscaler remain focused on its core competencies? From executive leadership on down, it starts with a commitment to RASS: reliability, availability, scalability, and security. These are the bedrock capabilities on which our ability to serve customers depends.

As an inline proxy, Zscaler is aware of the impact an outage could have on its user base and is therefore relentless in its focus on continuity. Resilience and redundancy are especially critical in sectors like banking and defense, but all Zscaler customers benefit from this commitment.  

Jay points out that one of McMahon’s first mandates after joining Zscaler was coordinating with customers on the testing and deployment of their disaster recovery solutions. He stressed his focus on working with customers to ensure there are plans drawn up in case of an incident. 

“It's really important that we have a shared document so that if something were to happen, we know who to contact, when to contact and how we can reverse escalate if need be,” McMahon said. "All I care about is helping our customers, and that's our plan.”

Ultimately, that means uninterrupted RASS. 

As we move from Las Vegas to The Netherlands, I am excited to hear from our customers across the region as to how we can continue to improve and grow our partnership. See you out there!

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