According to Gartner, cloud-based security web gateways services are showing rapid growth with a five-year historical compound annual growth rate of 32%, compared to just 5% for on-premise appliances. Billion Dollar Unicorn Zscaler has been named as a leader in the Gartner Secure Web Gateway Magic Quadrant for the seventh consecutive year.
Zscaler’s Journey
San Jose-based Zscaler was founded by serial entrepreneur Jay Chaudhury in 2008. After successfully flipping one of his many startups, Jay realized that his next challenge would be to create something that would have a lasting impact in the market. It was then that he came up with the idea of ZScaler.
Jay had already seen a lot of cloud-based companies and realized that security could also be offered through the cloud.create something that would have a lasting impact in the market. He did not want to rely on the old-school security model of having physical proxy devices installed at corporate locations. Instead, he wanted to build a network of checkposts within data centers so that traffic could get directed to the nearest data center for inspection and security. With this idea in his mind, he hired his development team to build a scalable proxy.
Soon, Zscaler had launched its Security-as-a-Service platform to deploy security into the Internet backbone. Today it delivers unified, carrier-grade internet security, next generation firewall, web security, sandboxing/advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, data loss prevention, SSL inspection, traffic shaping, policy management and threat intelligence to over 15 million users across 5,000 organizations globally, including 50 of the Fortune 500. Its customer list includes names like United Airlines, NBC, GE, Nestlé, ExxonMobil, Schneider Electric, the United States Marines, NATO, and the National Health Services of the UK.
