Zscaler gives security a shot of AI

At its recent Zenith Live event, security services edge (SSE) market leader Zscaler released several new capabilities in its security platform designed for organizations that want to adopt zero trust in the cloud and manage risk from cyberthreats. The news comes as Zscaler also expands its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide a unified solution for organizations moving to the cloud.

For starters, Zscaler announced AI and ML capabilities for the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, a security cloud that processes more than 200 billion daily transactions and blocks 150 million attacks. With these enhancements, organizations will be able to shift to SSE, which secures access to the web, cloud services and private apps. Zscaler enables SSE within the Zero Trust Exchange platform by securely connecting users, apps and devices over any network. 

The use of AI/ML is critical here because the volume of data being generated by security systems has long passed the point where people can analyze the data to find insights and threats. 

Organizations can now detect and prevent phishing attacks using Zscaler’s AI-enabled zero trust platform, which pulls real-time analytics on threat intelligence from 300 trillion daily signals. The enhancements also enable user-to-app segmentation to minimize the attack surface with AI-enabled policy recommendations. Security teams can customize policies based on a risk score for users, devices, apps and content. Additionally, organizations can perform root cause analysis and resolve issues more quickly, so users aren’t interrupted. 

Zscaler jumps into CNAPP 

The second announcement from Zenith Live was a new Posture Control solution that addresses hidden security risks across cloud-native app environments. Integrated into the Zero Trust Exchange, Posture Control allows devops and security teams to prioritize and remediate risks — such as unpatched vulnerabilities and misconfigurations — in cloud-native apps earlier in the development lifecycle. Posture Control extends security directly into developer workflows by providing organizations with a unified platform. With this product, Zscaler jumps into the cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) space, a term recently coined by Gartner to describe security that protects and secures cloud native application architectures, which includes microservices and containers. 

Additionally, Posture Control builds on the security capabilities of Zscaler’s Workload Communications solution for securing cloud apps at runtime. Together, Posture Control and Workload Communications unify development and runtime security of cloud-native and virtual machine (VM)-based apps running on any service in any cloud. This means security, IT and devops teams can secure cloud apps without disrupting development processes.

One of the key features of Posture Control is advanced threat and risk correlation. The solution can assess multiple security issues that appear to be low-risk individually but could potentially lead to greater risks when combined. Posture Control provides full visibility into risks across multicloud environments, including VMs, containers and serverless workloads. Zscaler integrates with development platforms such as VS Code, devops tools like GitHub and all major cloud providers to give organizations more control.

AWS and Zscaler expand relationship

AWS is another cloud provider that has had an extensive relationship with Zscaler. Together, the companies will now offer more capabilities to organizations that want to consolidate and simplify their cloud security operations. For example, Zscaler’s Posture Control is built and operated on AWS. Zscaler said it chose AWS as a cloud provider for the solution because of its scope of services, scale, reliability and prevalence with Zscaler’s customer base.

Zscaler also extended zero-trust security to workloads on AWS via its Zero Trust Exchange platform. Zscaler has integrated with AWS native technologies, such as Gateway Load Balancer, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS CloudFormation and AWS Auto Scaling. On top of that, the Zero Trust Exchange now protects workloads running on AWS Wavelength by granting zero trust access directly to devices connected to the mobile network.

Chris Preimesberger is a former editor of eWEEK and a regular VentureBeat contributor who has been reporting on and analyzing IT trends and products for more than two decades.

Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. He spent 10 years at Yankee Group and prior to that held a number of corporate IT positions. Kerravala is considered one of the top 10 IT analysts in the world by Apollo Research, which evaluated 3,960 technology analysts and their individual press coverage metrics.