Zscaler founder looks at past and future of company strategy.
Adoption of zero trust as a strategy is seeing the end of traditional network security tools as businesses aim to be more agile and ‘move faster.’
Speaking at the Zenith Live 2025 conference in Prague, Jay Chaudhry, chairman and founder of Zscaler, says the company’s concept of zero trust is ensuring every user could access every application, whether it's a SaaS application, internet or cloud, and now customers want to take the next step and do zero trust for workloads, IoT devices and LLM models.
“So our focus became that any entity should be able to talk to any other entity or any other application or destination that is important,” he said.
Private Cloud Applications
In a press Q&A held at the event, he said that combining Zero Trust with AI capabilities is making enterprises a lot safer, and as part of being more agile, companies are moving away from traditional network security tools like firewalls and VPNs, as businesses move into using applications on the private cloud.
He also said that with everyone building private networks, and with “applications and users everywhere” there is nowhere to put firewalls, and looking at the company’s foundation in 2007, Chaudhry said it was not interested in building next gen firewalls, but building exchange switchboard and “that is the genesis of where we started.”
Zero Trust Innovation
He asked why ‘there are lots of copycats trying to say we can do what Zscaler does at a third the price or half the price’ but are ‘barely trying to copy the user side of it’ when users need Zero Trust every day “and we keep on innovating this area.”
He went on to say that users no longer connect to a network, just to applications, and IT leaders do not see trusted users anymore, and any user can access any application anywhere, and as workloads communicate with each other, and Zero Trust can enable that.
The next stage is AI agents being built, and Chaudhry said this is no different than dealing with users, “except we need to figure out the identity, but once we do that, the same policy can help us to make sure your AI agents have the same ability to access the right thing.”
Looking at recent acquisition of Red Canary, Chaudhry said the technology will give Zscaler Agentic AI for automation of detection and response, and reflecting on the 2024 acquisition of Avalor, he denied that Zscaler is becoming a managed detection and response, as “we are fundamentally a technology company, this acquisition allows us to get to the market 10 or 12 months soon with a more comprehensive solution.”
Written by
Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
