Zero Trust infrastructure crucial for India's digitalisation: Zscaler senior exec

New Delhi : Security solutions based on zero trust technology are able to ensure robust public digital infrastructure, cyber security solutions provider Zscaler has said.

Zero Trust security in cybersecurity operations is an added layer where no one is trusted by default from inside or outside the network in an organisation or cluster. Due diligence is required from everyone trying to gain access to network resources, which has been shown to prevent data breaches. “One of the great examples … is the UPI story, even as the Western world has not seen such rapid adoption of online payments and transactions.

Zero-Trust architecture in this financial ecosystem is critical to make sure that user data, their contact number, their addresses, their first and last names are kept safe,” according to Zscaler Senior Vice President for Product Management, Dhawal Sharma. Zscaler is a cloud security company that provides solutions for organisations to enable work from anywhere.

Its Zero Trust Exchange platform connects and secures users, workloads, and devices over any network from any location. “India is witnessing a digital transformation across various sectors. We have 4 out of 6 largest private banks in India as our customers, many healthcare chains are our customers. We are working with certain government agencies in India as well.

With the rapid adoption of digital technologies and increasing volume of sensitive data being handled, cybersecurity is becoming the top priority,” Sharma said. Zscaler is also collaborating with the Ministry of Information Technology (Meity) to engage 1 lakh interns from colleges and universities to provide education on Zero Trust Security. The network security company is known for preventing employees from accessing blocked sites on their work laptops.

It is operating in India since 2014. The company said it has grown fivefold in three years in India on the back of “rapid digitalisation”, and employs a large chunk of its workforce in India. “In the last three years, our India business has grown more than 500 per cent as a result of rapid digitalisation. And even though we are headquartered in the US, about 40 to 45 per cent of our global workforce is based in India in five cities across Bengaluru, Mumbai, Mohali, Pune and Hyderabad,” Sharma told PTI.

Zscaler has its own cloud network with 150 data centers, known as Zero Trust Exchanges so that their security is done locally rather than going through data centres which otherwise slows down sites from loading. Dhawal also spoke about the risk Generative AI brings to enterprises, ranging from data loss forever to undistinguishable phishing emails written on ChatGPT.

“We are seeing a lot of sophistication coming in (cyber attacks). Hackers and attackers are building their own large language models to beat enterprise security controls. We have to stay one step ahead of it,“ he said. The company has also built controls to prevent unauthorized use of generative tools for workplaces.