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| By Michael A. Robinson |
I’ve written about the costly fight going on between cybercriminals and cybersecurity developers before.
But these new sobering stats on cybercrimes show the need to remain very vigilant, to say the least:
- The total cost of cybercrime globally will reach $10.5 trillion this year — and is projected to hit $15.6 trillion by 2029.
- With AI, it is getting worse. Some 97% of companies have seen generative AI security issues and breaches.
- Ransomware attacks now cost an average of $1.85 million per incident.
The number of attacks is also still rising:
The fastest-growing area of concern is cloud-based breaches.
According to VikingCloud, 61% of companies are experiencing at least one cloud attack a year.
However, one company is looking to change that.
And it has the potential to succeed, where many others have failed.
Zero Trust on the Cloud
Zscaler (ZS) is pioneering a cybersecurity paradigm for the cloud it built from the ground up called “zero trust.”
Unlike many of its peers, it doesn’t rely on a “perimeter-based” model overseeing a tangle of virtual private networks (VPNs) and firewalls.
Instead, Zscaler focuses its efforts to combat threats at the user, device, network and application levels.
This allows it to operate more effectively in today’s popular remote-hybrid work environment.
The company’s Zero Trust Exchange platform acts like a switchboard to securely connect users based on one-on-one policies managed at the local, not the network, level.
This cyber innovation has great timing, as over half of organizations experienced a VPN attack in the past year.
The troubling situation companies face with cyberattacks, including millions in ransom and damaged reputations, has helped propel Zscaler into a dominating cloud-security firm.
Customers like General Electric and Siemens use the firm’s offerings to reduce the number of infected machines, lower infrastructure costs and speed onboarding.
Of course, part of its success comes from its huge scale.
It monitors over 400 billion daily transactions and prevents 9 billion daily incidents through a mind-boggling 500 trillion daily AI cloud signals.
No wonder Zscaler is finding rapid adoption for its disruptive technology.
More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies make up Zscaler’s 7,700 customers and 41 million users worldwide. The company now boasts over $2 billion in annual recurring revenue with 81% gross margins. But it’s just getting started.
CEO Jay Chaudhry says Zscaler is aiming to scale the business to $5 billion in annual recurring revenue as it looks toward a $96 billion addressable market.
Massive Global Reach
Founded in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose in 2008, the firm helped pioneer the whole concept of cloud security.
That’s why Zscaler operates in a fashion designed specifically to address the rise of cloud computing.
As recently as five years ago, surveys showed IT professionals in charge of corporate computers preferred to keep a big chunk of data and apps running on their own networks.
But that has shifted as more firms have seen cyberattacks on their systems splashed across the headlines.
We’re talking companies like Microsoft, Tesla, Apple, Cisco, American Express and T-Mobile, just to name a few.
The way Zscaler does all this is through a suite of solutions. The firm provides firewalls, threat detection and a wide variety of other cybersecurity solutions tailor-made for the cloud.
Zscaler now processes more than 250,000 security updates to its thousands of customers per day, including over 150 data centers across the world.
In fact, over half of its sales come from offshore, giving us great geographical diversity in a high-growth field.
Armed with more than 400 current or pending patents, Zscaler now ranks as one of the biggest providers of cloud-based Web security gateways.
Even better, the services themselves are delivered through subscription-based cloud sales.
In turn, these provide massive revenue growth of more than 30% a year with gross margins of 80%.
I recommended my paid readers invest in ZS a little over a year ago. They are already up 78%.
But I don’t think you missed out on anything.
These threats aren’t going anywhere. And Zscaler’s solutions are in high demand.
It’s a great chance to invest in disruptive cybersecurity with a firm that boasts superior earnings growth.
Best,
Michael A. Robinson
P.S. While you likely don’t need perfect timing to get into Zscaler, there is another major investment category that depends on it.
And on Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Juan Villaverde will be announcing version 2.0 of his Timing Model. You should free up that hour now and click here to get on the invitee list.
