Zscaler made new product and service announcements this week reflecting an aggressive growth strategy and intent to monetize generative AI.
Clarifying its vision that the future of zero trust is built on generative AI, Zscaler made many new product and service announcements this week at Zenith Live 2023 that reflect an aggressive growth strategy aimed at upselling and cross-selling new cybersecurity services on its cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange™ (ZTX) platform. Zscaler thus joins the race to monetize generative AI on its platform while assuring customers of the platform’s security.
CrowdStrike, long known for its AI and machine learning expertise, recently introduced Charlotte AI as its generative AI cybersecurity analyst. Google Cloud Security AI Workbench and Microsoft Security Copilot are among the leading generative AI-assisted cybersecurity solutions.
Palo Alto Networks‘ CEO Nikesh Arora remarked on that company’s latest earnings call that Palo Alto sees “significant opportunity as we begin to embed generative AI into our products and workflows.” Arora added that the company intends to deploy a proprietary security LLM in the coming year.
Other vendors are in the game as well. Airgap Networks with its ThreatGPT, as well as Recorded Future, SecurityScorecard, SentinelOne, Veracode and ZeroFox are all delivering AI-based services today. Boards expect CISOs and CIOs to get behind generative AI
Zscaler’s keynote quickly addressed one of the most discussed topics among customers at the event: the threat of internal data leaking into publicly available LLM models. Interviews VentureBeat conducted with Zscaler customers confirmed that news of Samsung engineers’ recent feeding of sensitive data into ChatGPT had led to board-level discussions of how much and which generative AI-based technologies would be accessible at their companies.
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VentureBeat spoke with Alex Phillips, CIO at National Oilwell Varco (NOV), about his company’s approach to generative AI. Phillips, tasked with educating his board on the advantages and risks of ChatGPT and generative AI in general, periodically provides the board with updates on the current state of generative AI technologies. This ongoing education process is helping to set expectations about the technology and how NOV can put guardrails in place to ensure Samsung-like leaks never happen.
Zscaler often hears the same concerns from its enterprise accounts, evidenced by the topic’s importance in the opening keynote. Syam Nair, chief technology officer at Zscaler, asked the audience: “How do I ensure that I protect that data? I protect the data from being used as well as its intellectual property that will not be used in terms of training models in the public domain. This is where zero trust and the need for zero trust for AI applications comes into being.”
Zscaler sees generative AI strengthening zero trust across a broad spectrum of cybersecurity challenges today, starting with solving the dilemma of using generative AI for productivity without introducing a strategic security risk.
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