Zscaler Pulse Podcast: Insights on Cybersecurity, Zero Trust, and Preparing for Zenith Live 2025

Hey, Ben. Awesome.

Yeah, Ben, Huxley, thanks for having me on with you guys. And right, I joined in right at the end of September in 2024. And I'm getting to know a lot of folks and so both internally and externally. So you'll see me speaking more and more at different events. Certainly Zenith Live coming up will be a big one. So I'll get to know more and more of you very soon. But I've been in cyber security pretty much my entire career. I was very fortunate to get into it very early in the late 90s and so 25 plus years in it and so I've seen lots of different angles of cyber. Started off working with firewalls and VPNs so very near and dear to this world on the network side. Did public key infrastructure and strong authentication at VeriSign for a number of years and worked through virtualization, cloud, and more recently right before I joined Zscaler I was the CEO of Exabeam, a company in the sec ops, security operations analytics and really SIEM space. And so there's so much and there always is so much going on in cyber and one of the things though that kind of landed me here at Zscaler is having just spent a number of years at a late-stage startup, I did see the excitement, but also the pressures on how do you differentiate yourself when the bigger players are increasingly getting bigger and more capable in terms of delivering services to customers in a way that they want to consume. And Zscaler was one of those organizations that I saw that is right on the cusp of having the potential to really make that move for being continuing to be a major cyber security player at the next level. And I didn't know Jay super well beforehand, but I knew of him certainly and we both actually got acquired into VeriSign way back when in Jay's first company that he sold. They bought a company I was working for about a year after that. So we've had this connection in different areas but I saw what Zscaler was doing and I felt my background having done SASE before for Palo Alto Networks and CASB and virtualized firewalls and doing security operations and investigation and response and exposure management all those kind of capabilities. It's kind of where Zscaler was going and I felt like I would be a great fit from a product leadership standpoint and the role and opportunity was available. So that's where it came from.

I'd say maybe the most I don't know if I'd call this surprising but I think the staying power of sort of first principles of what's important in a generically what's important in a good cyber security program. I think it's been fun to see that evolve with different names or lenses or definitions. Whether it's things like the CIA triad, confidentiality, integrity, availability, it's least privilege, it's zero trust. So you get these frameworks for how to look at cyber, but the principles are very similar and they just evolve. They become a little bit more mature in can you actually do it, right? So those foundational principles, they work outside of cyber as well. They work in physical security and in other areas. But the thing that's changed over 25 years is how practical is it to actually implement, right? Is it doable from a technology and from a people and process standpoint? Because you can envision what would be great, but is it actually practical to do? And that's what's changed the most in the 25 years of cyber. Things that weren't really possible to do. Well, now you can actually do them. So you have to factor that in. Do I want to do them? Can I operationalize it? Is it too expensive to do? Right? So it becomes impractical. But the technology has made it possible and that's what's exciting.

So this will be my first Zenith Live. I've done user conferences before. But to me you're always trying to strike that balance. It is a user conference. So the audience are people who generally speaking will have some understanding of Zscaler. So you can't go too 101, this is what the company is about. But you also have to recognize we're doing a lot and we're evolving our thinking constantly as any good company should do. So we have to retell the story and modify the story and adjust it and explain why we said we were doing A and now we're doing A1 or we're now moving over a little bit to B and here's why. Right? So I think my job as a chief product officer and Jay's job as a CEO as well, right, is you have to tell stories. You have to tell that story and that vision so that people who are listening can understand well why is Zscaler going down that path? Why aren't they doing something else? Right? And we're certainly not omniscient. We're not everywhere. We can't think about everything, but we do spend a lot of time debating which directions we should go in. Where should we double down or triple down? Where should we reduce time and effort? And so it's I'm happy to say it's not without thought. Sometimes, you know, the goal for us is to make that come through, right? Yeah, we did think about that and we decided here's where we can add the most value. Oh, yes, we could do that other thing, too, but right now we just can't do everything. And so being able to explain that in a world where there's just limitless opportunities for us to actually help and engage with our customers, finding the ones that can be most impactful and being clear about how we communicate what we're going to do and not do.

So, you know, we have these sort of I won't even necessarily call them run-up events to Zenith Live, but we do a number of more intimate CXO exchanges and IT summits around the world. And so, I've just come off of three of them. We did one in Fort Lauderdale, one in Mumbai, and another one that we just finished two weeks ago in Portugal. And so what I find out of those is it's just the customer interactions are outstanding. So the level of engagement, the level of excitement about what we're doing, but also the and it's okay, the pressure on us to really deliver comes through. And so I would say at Zenith Live, it's an opportunity to take that messaging to a much broader audience and reach of this is what we're doing. Hearing the feedback from customers in some more of the directed sessions and smaller sessions on are we going down the right path? What would be really important to you? But also educating people so that they know how to implement what we're doing so that we're thought of as the first consideration when there's a cyber security challenge for their organization. What we want people to walk away with is can Zscaler help me with that? Right? And if not, okay, move on. But their first if we're doing something right, it means one of their first inclinations is going to be how can Zscaler help? And so that's what I want to get across at Zenith Live. And what I want to hear through all of the customer interactions engagements is how are we doing on that? Getting that feedback that hey, we're doing the right things or where we can possibly do better at.

Sure. Yeah, that's we're getting really close to releasing the catalog of all the breakouts. It is cutthroat. Everyone wants to present. We've got 63 slots and I think probably 603 people who would like to speak and what they want to share. So the work we've been doing now is trying to whittle that down into a digestible set of really programs and courses. Create some tracks so that if you want to follow a particular track but really ultimately give a lot of range of coverage across deeper technology dives on functionality capabilities that we're bringing to market across all of our core product pillar areas. So I'm excited about the tracks. There are some that will be a little bit more introductory because there will be some new folks, but there's also going to be ones that we will flag as more intermediate and advanced of real detailed best practices and implementation and in-depth understanding of how features and functionality work so that they can be applied to customers' organizations. So I think we've got the right balance. We have three really tiers. You get the overall keynote, the bigger picture vision and exciting new announcements. You get transformation theaters, which is think of it as 45 minutes to an hour of really dedicated time on a particular topic where we get to go deeper. And then we've got the 60 plus technical breakouts in the tracks where it's a much more specific area and we get that time to go deep.

I'll just say I appreciate you guys having me on and any chance we have to just be better at communicating to both our employees and to our broader customer and partner community about what we have going on and what we're doing is time well spent. So glad to be here and thank you guys for running the Pulse podcast.

Cheers.