Cognizant’s Zero Trust Journey: Building Security for an AI-Ready Future

Data protection and security transformation are central to Cognizant’s mission as a leading technology and professional services organization. The company has approximately 350,000 employees across the globe, delivering complex infrastructure, data, and security transformation to customers covering technology, healthcare, banking and financial services, retail and manufacturing, and more. The organization's workforce spans teams that directly touch customer-critical infrastructure and apps alongside back-office functions in finance and legal—each with distinct security requirements. Operating across a variety of industries, each with its own set of tools, policies, and vendors, resulted in multiple disconnected products, each solving a narrow problem, but none working together.

With thousands of customers relying on Cognizant to transform their infrastructure and business processes, the stakes are high. CISO Sivakumar Anantharaman’s directive was to replace a sprawling collection of point solutions with a single platform capable of scaling alongside the company's AI ambitions. 

As Sivakumar Anantharaman, CISO for Cognizant Corporate Functions and AI, puts it, “Security has evolved well beyond merely blocking threats. In an environment shaped by advanced technologies and increasingly sophisticated adversaries, trust itself has become the differentiator.” 

Before Zscaler, Cognizant relied on a data loss prevention (DLP) provider along with a fragmented mix of network and endpoint tools. This resulted in the proliferation of agents, inconsistent policy enforcement, and limited visibility across the organization's endpoints and users. 

Cognizant resolved this by consolidating multiple point products into a single unified zero trust platform. The engagement began with Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), which provides secure, direct zero trust access to the internet and SaaS for every user, everywhere by finding and stopping advanced threats. ZIA finds and stops advanced threats by inspecting all TLS/SSL-encrypted traffic. 

Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) replaced legacy VPNs that access private apps and resources. With ZPA, Cognizant discovered that users were receiving broader app access than necessary and reduced the number by up to 60%. This strengthened access control without impacting productivity. With ZPA in place, Cognizant can easily grant access to users whenever a real business need arises. The company also eliminated 90% of its legacy VPN infrastructure, retaining only a small number of customer-mandated exceptions, driving both product and network savings. ZIA and ZPA work together to give Cognizant close to 80% visibility into inbound app access. 

Cognizant also implemented Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) to monitor performance. AI-powered ZDX accurately pinpoints issues and speeds up resolution, enhancing the user experience and increasing productivity. 

Zscaler Zero Trust SASE securely connects users and branches to cloud apps, replacing firewalls at the network edges. Consistent policy enforcement is the stepping stone for the company’s broader zero trust journey. 

The complexity of data protection intensified as Cognizant scaled AI usage, from 20% to 50% within a single year, as mandated by its CEO. The pressure to adopt GenAI tools exposed the limitations of Cognizant’s existing security stack. Legacy tools were unable to deliver enterprise-wide GenAI controls, leaving mobile users exposed and security operations fragmented. To add to this, its siloed, fragmented security infrastructure led to agent sprawl, blind spots, and inconsistent visibility. The company’s existing DLP solution also lacked the resiliency needed to support its AI transformation vision. 

Zscaler secured Cognizant’s highest-priority initiative: its company-wide AI adoption. As the organization opened GenAI access to its global workforce, Anantharaman's team needed a way to enable innovation without losing control of sensitive data. 

AI usage was too critical to block, but also risky to use without guardrails. Cognizant needed visibility into what data was moving through AI prompts and a way to achieve automated policy enforcement. Zscaler closed that gap with GenAI Security, which gives the security team full visibility into AI platforms and categorizes employee access. It enables policy-based routing, where approved tools go through standard channels.

Zscaler Zero Trust Browser was implemented for safe web browsing in an isolated, secure cloud environment, securing high-risk access scenarios while giving employees room to explore and upskill on emerging AI tools safely.

“The results have been significant,” says Anantharaman. “AI usage across Cognizant has tripled over the past six to eight months, with monthly data transfer now reaching 500 to 800 Gbps.” The security team is now able to monitor the traffic while categorizing and governing usage at the prompt level. 

With the Zscaler platform, Cognizant manages access, risk, and cost across its global workforce delivering tangible gains in efficiency, security posture, and long-term savings. The team approached the transformation journey with a discover-define-enforce model. This method removed entitlements for users who no longer needed them. It also made it faster and easier for legitimate users to regain access when required, replacing long ticket queues with near-instant provisioning. The change also contributed to a measurable decrease in help desk tickets, freeing IT resources for higher-value work.

Zscaler has also helped accelerate the pace of Cognizant's business by cutting its offshore delivery center onboarding time from 120 days to 30 days, roughly 75% faster, translating directly into faster time-to-revenue on new client engagements. Zscaler is expected to expedite integration of Cognizant’s M&A projects up to 40% in IT savings as acquired companies align to Cognizant's security standard and infrastructure faster than ever.

“Consolidation delivered savings on two fronts. We moved away from multiple point products toward a unified platform which resulted in a tangible cost reduction of up to 30%. We also have intangible savings. The team no longer has to spend time learning and managing various tools and vendors and renewing contracts across a dozen vendors,” explained Anantharaman. 

Improvements in Cognizant’s security maturity carries financial benefits that go beyond IT savings alone. Regular assessment against frameworks like the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), combined with a more mature security posture, has strengthened Cognizant's standing with cyber insurers, potentially leading to reductions in premium costs over time.

On the AI front, Zscaler now bolsters Cognizant's ability to securely scale adoption across the business. Acting as a proxy through ZIA, Zscaler gives Cognizant visibility into which AI categories and platforms employees access for safe exploration and upskilling. Prompt-level visibility feeds directly into Cognizant's internal dashboards, helping the security team measure AI fluency across the workforce and continuously refine policy.

In just three months, the impact of Zscaler deployment has become clear company-wide. Zscaler prevented 2.9 billion policy violations and blocked 403,843 security threats. Zscaler's ability to inspect that traffic directly reduces business risk, detecting and blocking 220,918 encrypted threats. 

Cognizant's leadership points to a transformation that goes beyond security. Anantharaman says, “Consolidating our security stack has already delivered measurable returns as we reduced our vendor footprint by an estimated 25–30%, including the removal of shadow IT tools. Beyond efficiency gains, the company has reduced risk and driven real operational savings.

For Cognizant, security has always been inseparable from its core mission of delivering trust at scale. 

“For us at Cognizant, trust is not just a term, it is our core product. Customers place their trust in us to transform their businesses and infrastructure,” Anantharaman observed. “Our partnership with Zscaler assures them of a robust platform that can deliver on this promise across every layer.” 

Having adopted Zscaler's Data Security platform at scale, Cognizant has become a close collaborator with Zscaler's engineering and leadership teams. The organization benefits from a direct channel to shape the company’s product roadmap. This “client zero” relationship has given Cognizant the confidence to showcase its own deployment when recommending Zscaler to its own customers that are navigating similar transformations. 

Looking ahead, Cognizant plans to deepen its use of the Zscaler platform, as its AI strategy matures. This includes extending protection from Zero Trust Network Access to Zero Trust AI Access. Work is already underway on container security, AI runtime protection, and model red-teaming. As Cognizant continues to onboard pioneering AI models and expand AI adoption, Zscaler will remain central to how the company balances AI innovation with security control.