Zscaler reaches another Australian milestone

Zero-trust security proponent Zscaler reached another milestone in its Australian journey last week when it hosted its APAC conference in Sydney.

A year after appointing its first local Australian distributor, Orca Tech, the US cloud-based security vendor announced new security detection capabilities available through its Zero Trust Exchange cloud security platform, and the CrowdStrike XDR platform in partnership with CrowdStrike. 

The company, which helps secure organisations by replacing traditional inbound and outbound gateways with its cloud-delivered service, also discussed cybersecurity innovations including AI-powered root cause analysis and its ISP insights service. 

Zscaler also announced its top Asia Pacific and Japan partners for 2022 at its APJ Partner Summit and Awards Ceremony. Telstra was named Partner of the Year in the Australia-New Zealand (ANZ) region, while A23 was named ANZ Public Sector Partner of the Year. Tesserent won the Services Delivery Partner of the Year award, The Instillery won the ANZ Solution Provider of the Year award and Datacom was awarded ANZ Innovation Partner of the Year.

The event follows a period of growth in Australia for Zscaler. Since 2020, it has tripled its ANZ staff numbers, implemented five local data centres, including a co-located data centre in Canberra launched less than two months ago, and now claims 1.5 million local users.

In 2021, it gained an accreditation from the Australian Information Security Registered Assessors Program, meaning the company is authorised to serve Australian Government departments and agencies. Zscaler’s customers include Australia Post, NSW Government, Victoria State Government, NSW Education and the Electoral Commission of Queensland.

In May, the company also appointed a new Australia and New Zealand channel chief, John Milionis.  

CRN sat down with Zscaler senior vice president of global partners and alliances, Todd Meister, and head of alliances and channels APJ,  Foad Farrokhnia, to find out more about the company’s pitch and strategy. See what they had to say below.

What does zero trust opportunity look like in Australia for partners/MSPs?

Meister: The opportunity is massive. We have a 72-billion-dollar serviceable addressable market. We are at the early stages of the massive transformation, and a few things that are driving it include: 

1. When you position Zscaler solution, we provide a better security posture for the customer and reduce risk. 
2. We provide a better workforce experience for the employees, a better situation and better performance. 
3. Thirdly, we are reducing costs, retiring legacy systems and technology rationalisation. 

The opportunity is significant and we are at the early stages. 

How does the Zscaler platform compare to other approaches to Zero Trust & Identity Access Management? Who are your main competitors? 

Meister: We are the only at-scale, cloud-native security posture security solution. I think there’s a small number of other companies that are trying to assume a talk-track similar to ours, but very few can do what we do so I think we are uniquely positioned in the marketplace. Most other folks are coming from traditional client-based solutions into the cloud, whereas we are cloud and only cloud. It’s a leadership position for us currently. 

To what extent is Zscaler’s zero trust play relevant to Australian small businesses?

Meister: In the downmarket, we represent an easy button solution for smaller businesses - we make it very simple. The three benefits I mentioned earlier are there, but in an easy way to do it.

The other benefit is that, when you go to a cloud native solution, for those smaller entities, one of the biggest challenges they have is how to find, hire or retain security specialists. When you move that into a cloud solution, we are the specialists, so they don’t have that same challenge with finding, hiring and retaining security folks.  

Farrokhnia: By having a solution that sits in the cloud, those mechanisms and management become less onerous on the customer.  

In August last year, Zscaler appointed its first local distributor, Sydney-based Orca Tech. In April this year, we saw Victoria’s Department of Education used Zscaler tech to expand its traffic monitoring. Have there been any more recently Zscaler developments in Australia since then?  

Farrokhnia: We are continually investing in the APJ marketplace from a channel perspective and we’ve talked a lot about the criticality of our partner ecosystem being able to scale, but also grow our business towards our $5 billion dollar aspiration.

We partnered with Orca Tech in terms of bringing on a distributor that would help us with our scale in the Australian market, and predominantly that strategy was very much to get to a larger subset of customers that were not necessarily in the very top end of the enterprise market, but going down into various other segments, and that’s been a successful play for us.  

From a broader perspective of what we’ve done, we’ve gone from a model of having quite a lot of partners, to a much more focused approach. Whilst we haven’t added a whole bunch of partners, we’ve invested more deeply with the partners that make sense in this market and actually help us deliver those customer outcomes.  

Meister: We are committed to doing more with our current partner base, compared to just having everyone representing our product. We want a close relationship with less partners so that they can truly be an extension of us. 

Farrokhnia: In terms of new developments or exciting things that we’re bringing to market, we’ve started to pilot with a subset of partners our services authorised program here in Australia, whereby we are taking partners through a set of protocols, training, enablement, shadowing from us, to make sure they have the skill sets to actually be able to deliver our platform from start to end. 

Have you aligned your go-to-market solution with any security frameworks or government certifications? 

Meister: There are several security frameworks and it's really independent to the customer as to which one they follow. We can align to or work with any of them, so once we understand what framework they’re using, then we can explain how our technology enables that or satiates the requirements of that. 

In addition to that, we have certain certifications that we’ve accomplished, for example the US Federal Government has a FedRAMP Certification that we can use there. 

Farrokhnia: In Australia, we have a protected status with IRAP, which obviously allows us access to a lot of government bills and public sectors. 

Is Zscaler helping partners know what their dollars have achieved (in security)?

Meister: I would say that one of the things I think we help a lot with is  “It’s all about time to value”, and you’re quantifying the three things I talked opened with that I think are of strategic value.

1. How are we providing a better user experience?

2. How are we providing a better security posture?

3. How are we doing that at a lower cost to serve?

All that ties together and validates what our security solution is doing.

In many cases, as people move from legacy castle-n-moat security type environments which are appliance-based hardware, a lot of tech rationalisation is going on as well.

I would say it’s all three of those things combined. Ideally if we hit one it’s value added, but in many cases we are hitting all three, and it’s really unique to the customer.

We do a lot of business value assessments so understanding from the customer what exactly their internal requirements are, what exactly the trying to accomplish and then actually mapping how our solution solves their problems and then we’ll deliver that back to the customer in a business value assessment. So, it’s really unique to each customer.

Are there any significant chapters to come in the hybrid work story that security resellers and partners should be readying for? 

Meister: Hybrid is not going away. If anything, we are going to see more and more people working remotely. I think the key for Zscaler is that we enable the hybrid work force. The difference is, how do you provide an experience that is equal to or better than being in the office, but with a security posture that is equally as satisfactory for the corporation. That’s our sweet spot.