TECH TRENDS

Kavitha Mariappan , Executive VP , Customer Experience and Transformation at Zscaler , is responsible for driving global transformation and innovation across all facets of Zscaler ’ s business , customers , strategy , products and operations , with a strong focus on customer value creation . She is a passionate champion of diversity at Zscaler and in her community . At Zscaler , she co-chairs the D & I team and serves as executive sponsor of WIZE ( Women in Zscaler Engage ), an internal employee group that helps co-workers advance their careers . She spoke to Intelligent CXO at Zenith Live 2024 in The Hague about the priorities of the CXO community and equality in tech .

What are the top priorities for the CXO community ?

One of the most important things for all organisations , whether it ’ s private sector or public sector , is how prolific the cyberthreat landscape is and there are multiple reasons for that . One is obviously the workforce is more remote than ever . We ’ re never going back 100 % into the office , whether we like it or not .

We ’ re also seeing a focus on OT so everything that we ’ ve done with users and devices , we want to be able to do the same for workloads , factories . If you think about it , a lot of OT devices don ’ t get patched as frequently as IoT . My phone gets upgraded regularly and automatically , but some of these very critical OT devices don ’ t get their patches for six months , so these all become targets .

The other thing is the geopolitical situation which is also pushing us towards CXOs needing to be much more vigilant on what threat actors are trying to do . These threat actors are getting quite nefarious , and if they ’ re starting to manipulate or monopolise tools like AI , they are very sophisticated and very targeted , and so CXOs need to be prepared for that .

There are also these mega trends . We ’ ve always talked about cloud mobility , IoT and we ’ re seeing AI become a huge mega trend – the United Nations is calling it the Fourth Industrial Revolution .

The other element is the data deluge . What do we do with the amount of data that we ’ re collecting ? Now people want to collect this data . The thing about AI is , you need to be sitting on Big Data . There are storage costs , there are privacy concerns – are we storing things that we need to be storing for forensic reasons that we potentially shouldn ’ t be ? How are we securing some of this ? And then taking a look at cost cutting – efficiency at the branch , efficiency at the endpoint and really starting to think about how is this amount of traffic traversing our network ? And this is where we ’ re starting to see people wanting to move towards a firewall-less and VPN-less world – this is an attack vector that must be eliminated .

How does a business approach cybersecurity ?

What is most important thing – what are your crown jewels ? What can you not live without ? We begin with that and we begin with what are your business priorities ? This isn ’ t about ‘ that is good tech ’ or ‘ that looks really cool . Let me put AI in place ’. Do you need to put an AI initiative in place ? Is there a mandate ? Are you seeing AI generated threats ? Are you seeing them hit more of your Internet-based traffic or your OTbased traffic ?

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