Dive Brief:
- Cloud security company Zscaler went public Friday and closed the day trading 106% above its opening price of $16 per share. With the stock value more than doubling to $33 per share, Zscaler's market cap reached $3.87 billion Friday, reports Market Watch.
Zscaler lights up the tower in Times Square #Zscaler #IPO #ZscalerIPO #securitycloud pic.twitter.com/nz5rzgiLKd
— Zscaler (@zscaler) March 16, 2018 - The 10-year-old company was built on the premise that security needed to reflect how users interact with applications as technology shifted away from the data center, according to a company blog post. Zscaler put users at the center of security, decoupling "network access from application access." Rather than relying on "castle and moat" style of protection, security can persist regardless of a network.
- The first big tech IPO of 2018, Zscaler is the fifth company "founded, funded [and] built" by CEO Jay Chaudhry. Zscaler's cloud runs on 100 data centers and touts 2,800 customers with users in 185 countries, according to the company. Zscaler says it receives 40 billion internet requests during peak periods every day and stops 100 million threats daily.
Dive Insight:
Zscaler's offerings reflect how cybersecurity has evolved. Organizations used to rely on the data center and company-hosted applications to deliver services, securing operations by controlling access and relying on a robust firewall.
But as cloud computing became best practice for organizations, security became harder to guarantee, particularly as users accessed applications outside of corporate networks.
The "moat" approach to security has quickly gone out of fashion, particularly as organizations have struggled to lock down all the end points that persist in a complex enterprise environment.
Companies like Zscaler are helping give rise to a new type of security company, one that takes a targeted approach to a complex problem. The platform works to inspect network traffic without slowing down applications.
Rather than relying on the overhyped benefits of threat-hunting AI or hyper-intelligent machine learning systems, security companies need to deliver tangible solutions that can help customers actively deter threats in the cloud application age.
