Zscaler Zero TrustBlogZscalerZero TrustSecurity
Blog • • 5 minute read

Bringing Zero Trust to Life: Practical Innovations from Zscaler Zenith Live 2025

Zenith Live 2025 showcased how Zscaler delivers AI-powered tools that transform Zero Trust from strategy into action, offering advanced segmentation and protections to secure cloud, apps and devices while eliminating threats across complex environments

I had the privilege of attending the Zscaler Zenith Live 2025 conference on June 3 and 4, 2025. As anyone who attended the conference can tell you, Zscaler is going "all in" on Zero Trust and AI. Initially, I approached this marketing narrative with a healthy dose of skepticism, questioning how it would translate into reality. Vendors cannot sell Zero Trust as a product or solution since it is a strategy aimed at preventing or containing breaches by eliminating trust relationships inherent in digital systems.

As I attended sessions and absorbed the conference content, I began to realize that Zscaler is onto something significant, designing their product suite to deliver on a Zero Trust strategy. Embarking on a Zero Trust journey begins with recognizing current challenges such as organizational silos and the complex technical requirements of the environment. It is crucial to implement appropriate controls incrementally to deliver the value of Zero Trust, aligned with specific business outcomes. 

Starting with a product can lead to misaligned investments and priorities, potentially causing Zero Trust initiatives to fail. Begin with a strategic approach that defines how your organization protects critical assets in an era of increasing complexity and risk. Once aligned with business outcomes, design from the inside out, focusing on small, manageable groupings of data, applications, assets, and services known as protect surfaces. Then, define who or what needs access and implement proper monitoring to inspect and log all traffic associated with the protect surface.

Taking the strategy forward requires designing an architecture to enforce the security controls of the protect surface. Some of the new Zscaler capabilities are unique in the industry, delivering modern tools for Zero Trust deployments. Zscaler stands out in the industry by offering innovative, AI-driven capabilities that are specifically designed to enable and streamline modern Zero Trust deployments across networks, cloud workloads, and connected devices. 

Let's examine some of the most interesting Zero Trust enabling capabilities I learned about at Zenith Live:

  • AI-Powered Segmentation: Zscaler AI-powered App Segmentation, at the core of Zscaler Private Access (ZPA), delivers precise user-to-app segmentation and a robust solution for easily deploying consistent policies at scale, eliminating lateral threat movement. It helps discover all applications within the organization and provides visual insights into which users or user groups have access to which applications. [1]
  • Zscaler Microsegmentation for Cloud Workloads: Zscaler further extends segmentation to cloud workloads with newly introduced host-based Microsegmentation service that provides granular host and process level segmentation policies using its AI-powered Segmentation engine for Workloads in public clouds as well as on-premises based workloads. The Zscaler Workload agent provides process and workload level metrics, traffic flows, as well device context, that protects crown jewels against lateral threats and compromise. [2]
  • Zero Trust Gateway for Cloud Workloads: Cloud-native service on AWS that enables organizations to secure communications from workload to the Internet, and East-West traffic between workloads and VPCs/VNETs, in under 10 minutes without deploying agents or VMs with a Zscaler managed offering. [3]
  • Unified Appliance for Zero Trust Branch: A unified appliance that secures communications between branches, campuses, and factories, and segments OT and IoT devices within them including legacy OT. By eliminating the need for firewalls, legacy NAC, VLAN configurations and VDI for remote access, organizations can stop lateral threat movement. [4]
  • Enhanced Generative AI Protections with Expanded Prompt Visibility: Provides greater visibility and control over GenAI applications, including Microsoft CoPilot, by enabling advanced prompt classification and inspection. Organizations can block prompts that violate policies and leverage existing DLP capabilities to safeguard sensitive data and ensure compliance across AI-powered workflows. [5]
  • AI-Powered Data Security Classification: Zscaler's newest AI-powered data security classification brings human-like intuition to identifying sensitive content, now including more than 200 categories, allowing advanced classifications that find new and unexpected sensitive data beyond traditional regex-based signature detection. [6]
  • Zscaler Cellular: A unified, zero trust solution for securing and managing cellular-connected IoT and mobile devices. It provides agentless, scalable security, centralized visibility, and seamless global connectivity, making it suitable for industries ranging from transportation to retail and beyond. [7]
  • Asset Exposure Management: Provides complete, accurate, and context-rich asset inventory. Leveraging the data correlation enabled by the Zscaler Data Fabric for Security, Zscaler's unique approach to CAASM empowers you to identify coverage gaps, automate CMDB hygiene, generate workflows for mitigation, and reduce asset risk. [8]

Attending conferences is a great way to network and connect with experts, but there is also a wealth of knowledge to gain from these events. Zscaler Zenith Live 2025 was a top-tier event, and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting new people and learning more about the exciting new offerings from Zscaler! 

Please engage with our experts to learn more about these innovative capabilities and how they can support you on your Zero Trust journey!

Visit the links below to learn more!

[1] https://www.zscaler.com/resources/data-sheets/zscaler-ai-powered-app-segmentation.pdf

[2] https://www.zscaler.com/resources/data-sheets/advantages-of-using-zscaler-for-microsegmentation.pdf

[3] https://www.zscaler.com/blogs/product-insights/zscaler-zero-trust-cloud-zero-trust-gateway

[4] https://www.zscaler.com/resources/data-sheets/zscaler-zero-trust-branch.pdf

[5] https://www.zscaler.com/products-and-solutions/securing-generative-ai

[6] https://www.zscaler.com/resources/data-sheets/zscaler-dspm-and-cloud-data-protection.pdf

[7] https://www.zscaler.com/products-and-solutions/zscaler-cellular

[8] https://www.zscaler.com/resources/solution-briefs/cyber-asset-management-risk-compliance-caasm.pdf 

Technologies