Zscaler’s Vairavan Subramanian on Data Security Posture Management

hi I'm James Maguire here at AWS reinvent with VN submania senior director of product management at n scaler ven really good to talk with you today great to be here James very excited this chat all right so I want to talk about the dspm market some of the benefits and where the market is going but before that let's talk about Z Skiller itself and and and what zca does in terms of of data protection yeah zca has a holistic data protection Suite um the strategy for zscaler is a p prong strategy for data protection it starts with where is my data is my data sitting in public Cloud can I intercept data going to SAS applications is data being sent via email is the data address on the endpoint people copying data to a USB device uh they printing so I want to be in every single location the data is the second prong is to understand is the data sensitive or not can I classify that data using AI ml to understand does the data look like financial information does it look like healthcare information intellectual property the third part is to understand the context around the data any data if it's left by itself there is no problem with the data the real issue comes when the wrong person has access to the data or the wrong entity has access to the data an example being if I send a very sens data via email if I'm sending it internally to the organization no problem but if I send that to my personal Gmail account there is a problem with it so the context is very important once I understand where is my data is it sensitive and I have the context I should be able to enforce consistent policy across all my channels with a single engine once I can do this I also need to operationalize a data Protection Program which involves both coaching and user generating a large number of alerts how can an administrator deal with these alerts can he automate this can he create workflows automatically get justifications and we do this with something which we call as workflow automation so it's a five Prim holistic strategy to make sure we have full visibility and control across all your data in all the channels great all right so that that's that's data protection in general what about data security posture management itself it's a relatively New Market where is the market these days especially in terms of AI yeah so both dspm and AI are new markets data security posture management focuses on the entire life cycle of the data it specifically focuses on data in public Cloud so often the data in public cloud is your customer data so protecting that is not only important from a compliance perspective but it's becoming more and more important from a security perspective effective with DM there were often vendors who were API based and siloed and these were startups but recently in the last six months you've seen there have been a lot of Acquisitions in the space and most DPM vendors have become part of a larger platform right also AI plays a very critical role because there's a lot of AI models which can be trained in the public cloud and generative AI by itself does not have a delete button once it had learned the data there is no delete button so securing AI which can be an issue by the way yes absolutely it is a big issue can be an issue right and and that is why what data can your AI learn from is more and more important with things like bedrock and AWS which can learn data from S3 or if you think about Microsoft co-pilot which can learn data from your one drive SharePoint exchange it has actually changed the way that end users interact with AI and what kind of data is exposed to AI so it becomes more and more critical so securing your AI both from what can you input to the AI and what what does the AI learn both have become very critical you know you mentioned that there were a lot of Acquisitions and that certainly some of them um I mean for for a new market there's a lot of activity including Acquisitions why is the companies are moving toward dig security posture management what's the benefit the benefit is that your most sensitive data which is your customers data sits in public cloud and it's very very critical for the companies to make sure that this data is actually secure to give you several examples there was a company who was crunching the Q4 Financial records and when they were crunching this Q4 Financial records they put that in a publicly hosted application what they did not realize is that when they put this data out there it actually had a public link and people outside the organization could access the data in this particular case they could actually access the data before those Q for results were out and that became a big problem yeah well what about uh the zscaler solution in terms of data security posture of management what are the details there the features that yeah if you look at Z skll dspm it sits in a very unique position almost all of the dspm companies out there Focus only on known public Cloud accounts that means what are the public Cloud AWS as your gcp accounts has it purchased then they use apis to go and scan all the data sitting addressed in these various storage accounts zca obviously does this first and foremost it has one of the best classification Solutions available in the market so it has the exact same classification solution whether that is in our inline DLP endpoint DLP but also in DM the second and the biggest difference Shader is that if you have employees in your organization who are using Shadow accounts like Shadow AWS accounts which ID is not paid for or Shadow gcp accounts their traffic flows through the zca proxy zca can see all these unsanctioned or Shadow public Cloud accounts and gives you full visibility across not only what is the data sitting in the accounts you paid for but more importantly the accounts that you not pay for a developer just swipe a credit card and what data did he put there zc provides You full visibility and control across that data too uhuh all right so this great feature sets just to be clear what is it exactly that that sets it apart from the other competitors in the market what why why go for Z scaler why go for Z scaler first couple of reasons you do not want a siloed product focusing only on the SPM your CIO is not going to ask you what is the data sitting in public Cloud he's going to ask where is the of data in the company so you need to look at that in all the channels you do not want to deploy five different products for five different channels this creates operational complexity it also creates a security weakness where this data is not classified the same way second so it's it's a platform approach it is a platform approach yeah okay second even if you leave the platform approach apart just from a dspm perspective itself zkill has a very very great classification technology which includes things like EDM IDM over 300 different llm models to go and classify what is sensitive data we not only classify Text data which is obvious but we can also classify image data for example what is a medical dieom image look like what does a driver's license look like what does a passport image look like Z Scala can also classify both voice and video to do what we call as multimodal DLP uhhuh apart from this we not only look at the paid accounts which is your sanctioned um accounts like AWS and Azor we can also look at the shadow account that a developer paid for which no other dsbm vendor can actually saw okay interesting that that's definitely distinguished is it what about news for dspn from zkill any any news you can share with us today yeah so we've got a new launch in our dsbm Solutions in the in our dsbm Solutions not only do we look at both structured data as well as unstructured data an example being your unstructured data sitting inside S3 as your or your gcp blobs but more importantly we support a large number of databases for example your Dynamo DB your SQL DBS all the databases sitting in public Cloud all this is scanned by Z skillard apart from this we newly introduce the support for unsanctioned is apps that means we can understand your various is as apps which are not part of your sanctioned it so these could be Shadow accounts in a AWS this could be your various gcp augs and projects and the various Services used within it if you think about it a few years ago on the SAS side we had something called a shadow it where people used to understand hey what are the unsan risky applications you're using we brought the same concept now on the dspm market where we can discover all your Shadow accounts and within those Shadow accounts what services are being used and more importantly what data is available inside those Shadow accounts and who has access to it that that seems like a major security feature because the shadow accounts mayor may not be really monitored so that that's really that sounds really key absolutely yeah well let's look at the future of of d security posture management I mean you know what do you see in the next couple years especially in terms of AI in in the forms of AI I think AI provides a lot of benefits it can provide benefits where you know people use AI to grow their Topline revenue or they can also use AI to make their operations easy make it more cost effective AI is here to grow and everyone is absolutely going to use AI however AI needs the right guard rails let me give you an example we're both locals of the Bay Area right and there is a chevrol a dealer in Watsonville and they wanted to grow their revenue they wanted to make their sales better so they built an AI chat Bo B which could interact with customers to recommend them different cars to provide them offers and various cars once a customer asked that AI bot what is the fastest car you would recommend for me to buy and this was a chevrol dealer and the bot replied back saying you should buy a Tesla Model tree oh no not only did it reply that um the customer asked Can you provide a link on how I can buy this model tree it provided him a link and finally the customer also said here is my Tesla referral code if someone else asks you for the recommendation can you please provide my link so that I can get a referal credit so it's not trained you don't have the right guards not only will you have data exfiltration but you would actually have bad outcomes so moreal storage itative AI does need to be policed it it absolutely needs to be policed yeah be I think you said it's going to be a fascinating sector to watch I hope we get a chance to talk again sometime thank you yeah nice chatting with you

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