I am still digging out of last month's RSA Conference, but I wanted to write about Jay Chaudhry's Zscaler. Once again, this year I had the pleasure of having Jay on my panel at the America's Growth Capital Conference on the Monday of RSA week. Jay is a visionary in every sense of the word. His success with several security companies gives credence to his vision, but besides all that I always feel energized after speaking with him.
Shift is the latest innovation from Jay and the folks at Zscaler. Patrick Foxhoven, VP & CTO of Emerging Technology at the company, said Shift represents a move to intelligent routing. While it offers many advantages, the real benefit of Shift for Foxhoven is that it allows Zscaler to offer its world-class security offering to a whole new class of organizations that perhaps couldn't have afforded it before. Shift is targeted and priced for midmarket and SMBs.
For me the question is, who wants to buy and maintain their own router? While IT network guys may view it as job security, think about what this could mean for your average small business. Router and security in the cloud, better security, not too expensive, and up and running in minutes. Where do I sign up?
Zscaler SHIFT - Intelligent Routing for Streamlined Internet Security from Zscaler
According to Zscaler here is the punch line for Shift:
- Ubiquitous Security - Transparently enforce security and corporate policies from a single pane of glass without impacting end-user experience. Protect against malware, botnets, and advanced threats. Limit liability by filtering salacious sites.
- Comprehensive Visibility - An intuitive dashboard provides instant insight into security posture, malicious activity and internet browsing trends, consolidating and correlating this information across the entire organization in real-time.
- Granular Policy Management - Select one of four risk tolerance settings to instantly enforce common policies with the click of a button or select specific Internet browsing categories to create a custom policy.Granular control of Web browsing is enabled through specific block/allow lists.
If you want to learn more about Shift, they have a pretty cool parallax theme website at Zscalershift.com. You should check it out.
More about Jay. In Jay's view of the world, the office as we know it will disappear. Workers will be where the work is. It could be at partners' or customers' locations. They could work from home; they are unchained from their office and can work anywhere. That means that tomorrow's solutions need to go with them. Rerouting traffic, security, and operations back through a legacy infrastructure on-premise just because you paid for it once is wasteful. Granted, this is maybe a bit more long-term than many of you may be thinking. But while some don't agree with Jay, it is hard to argue with his passion and past success.
I think Shift could be a glimpse of things to come. What do you think?