This post also appeared on LinkedIn.
Zenith Live 2020 has come to an end, but only after two days of engaging secure digital transformation customer stories, Zscaler cloud platform product innovations, hands-on architectural deep-dives, and some exciting keynotes. This year, Zenith Live went virtual, with sessions available online (and for free). That served to make the sessions all the more personal, since every speaker was seemingly in the room with me. Below, my highlights from day two.
Yesterday, Zscaler President and CTO shared Zscaler’s new innovations in CASB and DLP technology. Today, he kicked off the event with a session titled “Cyberthreats and Cloud Protection Innovations,” and began with the announcement of Zscaler Cloud Protection, an exciting new feature that secures enterprise applications and workloads. He also introduced Jeremy Embalabala, VP of Information Security for insurance brokerage firm HUB International. Jeremy has led secure digital transformation initiatives at HUB, and the switch to Zscaler (and the cloud) has improved both security and transparency. After HUB adopted Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), explained Jeremy, “[w]e gained new insight into our traffic flow. We were able to understand and categorize what type of traffic was flowing across our network, when previously we didn't have any visibility.”
After Amit, we heard from IT leaders with Zscaler customer Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. The Tokyo-based firm is the oldest pharmaceutical company in the world, and is celebrating its 240th birthday! CISO Mike Towers shared the company’s secure digital transformation journey to a zero trust architecture. He noted that Takeda works with more than 30,000 partners, and “nearly a quarter” of them present some level of cybersecurity risk. “The B2B area and the partner ecosystem,” said Mike, “ is another area where zero trust is something that we absolutely need.”
Zscaler has been a long-time development partner with Microsoft: The two companies’ cloud technologies complement each other to deliver benefits to enterprise customers. In a partner session today, Microsoft CVP Alex Simons provided an overview of Microsoft and Zscaler components of a unified zero trust architecture, and even invited some joint customers to join him. Matthias Quernheim, Head of Global Connectivity and Security Solutions with French pharmaceutical company Sanofi expressed great appreciation for the way cloud services from the two companies have benefitted his company. “In total,” he said, “we are really happy that we made the right decisions in 2019 going with Zscaler and Microsoft.”
In the afternoon keynote, Andy Greenberg—a Wired Magazine reporter and author of the book Sandworm—described his experience tracking notorious cyberattacks on Ukraine power infrastructure and the 2018 Olympics, as well as the genesis of the NotPetya malware release. His story (particularly the detective work behind tracing the attacks to the Russian state-sponsored Sandworm group) was gripping, but he offered some hope in the face of daunting cyber terror. “In this new era of hyper-sophisticated cyber war teams and highly motivated, well-resourced, for-profit ransomware cyber-criminal gangs carrying out targeted attacks,” explained Andy, “we may not be able to avoid being vulnerable...but we can be resilient against them.”
I hope you were able to attend and enjoy Zenith Live 2020. If you missed anything (today or yesterday), visit ZenithLive.com to view event session recordings. And keep an eye out for a future invitation to Zenith Live 2021. It might not be quite as virtual as this year’s event, but I’m sure it will be just as inspiring.
