Well this is a bit of welcome news from ZScaler.
The CrowdStrike partnership is certainly important there. A cloud-native voltron for a unified voice about the benefits of this approach to security. One can feed the other. The two cool kids on the block. Interesting.
But I have to say I think the other two announcements are bigger for the long term thesis.
Let’s unpack this one:
Zscaler, Inc., the leader in cloud security, today announced the Zscaler™ platform is now distributed across over 150 data centers, with the company’s latest data center opening in Val-du-Roi, Normandy, France. The expansion is part of the company’s ongoing mission to provide enterprise users with fast, secure, reliable access to applications and services regardless of location, empowering enterprises to accelerate their cloud adoption, securely.
“The physical footprint and end-to-end control of the network, infrastructure, and code base of our global cloud is crucial for ensuring availability, security, and performance at scale for customers transforming to the cloud,” said Amit Sinha, Zscaler CTO and President of R&D, Operations & Customer Service. “When architecting the Zscaler cloud, we placed compute at the edge—in every point of presence (POP)—to ensure minimal latency between the user and the application.”
The architecture of ZScaler requires a globally distributed collection of ZScaler data centers. This provides two things. 1) near instantaneous latency and 2) the ability to respond to demand in any region elastically by distributing spikes in traffic volume to other nearby data centers.
Now with 150 globally distributed data centers, up from 100 at time of IPO. That’s what we in the investing bitness call a moat. Would-be legacy-native solutions or other wannabes have a long road ahead of them to match that kind of scale and capability. You just can’t throw up that kind of physics in short order or try a work around using some sort of hybrid public/private solution.
To give some context I believe that AWS operates 69 availability zones(data centers). AWS wouldn’t be able to match the architecture scale of ZScaler.
The other is a big step for ZScaler.
Zscaler™ B2B is a unique solution that reduces the attack surface introduced by customer-facing applications that are exposed on the internet. Built with the fundamentals of a service-initiated zero trust network access (ZTNA) architecture, Zscaler B2B enables authorized customers to view applications, based on business policy, without ever exposing the apps to the Internet where they are often attacked.
One of the problems for ZS that became obvious in this last quarter was their top-down c-suite type product and the difficulties of providing an adequate sales force for that. These days we are basking in the success of many SaaS bottom-up developer level products that run viral in an organization. ZScaler is a huge deployment or it doesn’t deploy. You either go their route which requires the tippy toppest level engagement or you don’t.
But what we have here is a product that maybe only one team with one app will enlist ZScaler for help securing a B2B use case. This is the first product that might start small and then span outwards and upwards and then start the conversations of using ZScaler and cloud security on that larger scale.
I think this will be an excellent smaller level on-boarding tool that will allow ZScaler to broaden its user base at a fraction of the CAC. Something I felt since the last call they desperately needed.
Added some back premarket.
Darth