Zscaler Tightens AI Security With New Tools – Source: securityboulevard.com

LAS VEGAS — Zscaler Inc. on Tuesday announced advanced artificial intelligence (AI) security capabilities to tackle the complexities in deploying advanced AI tools in large, distributed environments at its developers conference here.

The new features are built to harness the power of AI for laser-focused precision, automated threat neutralization and turbocharged collaboration to unify users, apps, devices, cloud environments and branches.

“Our mission is how do we become the ChatGPT for security, for zero trust security?” Phil Tee, executive vice president and head of AI innovations at Zscaler, said in an interview. “We think we’re in the right place. We secure 500 billion transactions a day.”

“Zscaler is redesigning the boundaries of enterprise security by advancing AI-driven innovations that address the complex challenges of today’s digital age,” Adam Geller, chief product officer at Zscaler, said in a statement. “With industry-first capabilities like AI-driven threat detection and automated segmentation, we empower organizations to adopt and scale AI responsibly and securely.

“These advancements not only neutralize emerging threats but accelerate collaboration and operational efficiency, allowing businesses to capitalize on the transformative power of AI with confidence and precision,” Geller said.

Leading the tools are:

— AI-powered Data Security Classification. Zscaler’s newest AI-powered data security classification is engineered to bring human-like intuition to identify sensitive content for more than 200 categories, allowing advanced classifications to find new and unexpected sensitive data beyond traditional regex-based signature detection.

— Enhanced Generative AI Protections with Expanded Prompt Visibility. Enhanced capabilities for GenAI apps like  Microsoft Copilot will allow advanced prompt classification and inspection. Organizations, for example, can block prompts that violate policies and leverage existing data-loss prevention (DLP) capabilities to safeguard sensitive data and ensure compliance across AI-powered workflows, according to Zscaler.

— AI-Powered Segmentation. Zscaler unveiled its first purpose-built, user-to-application segmentation AI automation engine to simplify app management, app grouping and segmentation workflows with user identity built in.

— Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) Network Intelligence. Propelled by AI, Network Operations can instantly benchmark and visualize internet and regional ISP performance, correlating last-mile and intermediate ISP outages with multi-path flow analysis to optimize connections to Zscaler data centers and applications.

Zscaler Chief Security Officer Deepen Desai outlined multiple specialized AI agents that work in tandem — a triage agent, detection agent, context agent, and response agent — whose tasks are to predict potential breaches “before they move along in the environment, and map the attack path that the threat actor may take in the environment and provide actionable response actions,” he said in an interview.

Additionally, network operations teams can also proactively detect, isolate and analyze trends for disruptive ISP issues, such as packet loss impacting users, enabling faster remediation through rerouting, and cost savings via better ISP negotiations.

Separately, Zscaler announced a new suite of solutions that let customers quickly adopt Zero Trust Everywhere. The innovations allow businesses to modernize and scale securely by providing end-to-end segmentation between and inside branches and enhancing security across multi-cloud environments.

“The three waves of AI used to be described as security coming last in priority, but that is changing. It is now at the forefront of conversation because AI is so scary,” Nathan Howe, group vice president of innovation at Zscaler, said in an interview. “Data is everywhere.”

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who attended the conference, said feedback from customers and channel partners was “very positive” as Zscaler leverages AI into “three key growth drivers”: Zero Trust, Data Security, and Agentic AI.

Generative AI traffic has surged 890% in the past year, while security incidents tied to GenAI such as data loss incidents have more than doubled, according to research from Palo Alto Networks Inc. Thursday. The average enterprise used 66 GenAI apps, with 10% flagged as high-risk.