“My success so far has mainly been because I have very little attachment for money. My obsession is really to make sure that the internet and cloud are a safe place for everyone to do business.” Jay Chaudhry.
Jay ChaudhryJay Chaudhry is the founder and CEO of Zscaler, a cybersecurity firm he started in 2007. Chaudhry was born in a small village in the foothills of the Himalayas, in India. His community was self-sustaining.
He was a bright student all throughout school and ended up being the number one ranking student in his state. He then went on to the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi (one of the best technological institutions in the world) to study electronics engineering. After that, he went to the University of Cincinnati for his master’s.
After a few jobs out of school, he married his wife and decided to put their life savings on the line for their first startup in 1997- SecureIT. After starting SecureIT, AirDefense, CipherTrust, CoreHarbor, and Air2Web, Chaudhry founded Zscaler in 2007.
Zsclaer is the leader in three things: Rethinking Cloud Application Security, which leads to the Rethinking of Networks, and Rethinking Network Security. When Network changes from hub-and-spoke to direct to cloud, network security also needs to change with it.
Jay was one of the first people to see that inherently secure “network security” was what people needed. He saw that people were accessing applications from everywhere in the world (cafes, airports, hotels, etc.). There needed to be a way to protect people from anywhere and everywhere. Cisco is the main competitor of Zscaler. The difference between the two is that Cisco is at the DNS and IP layers, whereas with Zscaler you do not even get an IP. You access the cloud directly. This direct access to the cloud is what makes Zsclaer different from Cisco. Because Zscaler is using cloud computing as a disruptive technology, they have a leg up on competitors like Cisco.
Since more and more people are working from home, Zscaler has the ability to provide more protection from more locations than its competitors do.