“I looked at the world changing and saw that the way we work, how we work, and where we work was changing,” says Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry. “The security that was being offered by many vendors was meant for protecting offices. I said let’s build security in the cloud as a cloud security platform similar to what Salesforce did to take CRM to the cloud and what Workday did take HCM to the cloud. We are doing this kind of thing to disrupt old-school legacy security.”

Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO of Zscaler, discusses how Zscaler is disrupting old-school legacy security in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security

I built this company starting in 2008 with a simple mission, let’s make internet and cloud a safe place to do business. I looked at the world changing and saw that the way we work, how we work, and where we work was changing. We could work anywhere on any device. The security that was being offered by many vendors was meant for protecting offices. I said let’s build security in the cloud as a cloud security platform similar to what Salesforce did to take CRM to the cloud and what Workday did take HCM to the cloud. We are doing this kind of thing to disrupt old-school legacy security.

The cloud is being adopted at a fairly good pace. It has taken a while but Office 365 adoption has changed a lot of things. All traffic of email is moving to the cloud. Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow are all on the cloud. As applications move to the cloud that drives the adoption of security to the cloud. We are seeing significant momentum where customers with CIOs are asking for security to be done right.

100 Million Security Threats Blocked by Zscaler Per Day

In fact, I was talking to a CIO who said, “I asked this question to my people. If something can be done in the cloud you can’t do it in the data center. If security needs to be done in the cloud, why are we buying these security hardware boxes?” I see the world rapidly changing. In the past couple of weeks, you’ve seen some vendors announcing earnings and acknowledging that security is moving to the cloud faster than they thought.

A lot of the (100 million threats blocked by Zscaler per day) are (state-sponsored). The scariest ones we see are phishing attacks. Every day we see tens of thousands of phishing attacks. These are highly targeted. People are tricked to click into these things. They click on something and their credentials get stolen and then the botnet attacks out there. To really protect against all these things you need to sit in line to inspect traffic going in and out.

Blocking the Bad and Protecting the Good

Zscaler acts as a check post, almost like an International Airport. We’re inspecting everything that goes in and out of your device to make sure that we’re blocking the bad and that we are protecting the good to help people do good business. That’s why the biggest of the big companies like GE and Siemens and United Airlines all depend upon Zscaler to protect their enterprise.

Okta is a wonderful company that’s in the identity business. Their job is to make sure that employees and the departments are properly listed for a given company. It’s like a phone book or a directory. They’re the source of information. Think of us as the airport. When I travel and leave the airport they scan my passport. When they scan the passport a call goes to the database of passports asking is Jay Chaudhry the right person? Can he travel? That’s what Okta does. Zscaler is in line to enforce policy.