KEY TAKEAWAYS - The Zscaler Indian-origin CXO Summit Inspiring, Connecting, and Elevating the Indian-Origin CXO

The new way of work crosses cultural divides, spans geographical boundaries, and secures both on-prem and work-from-anywhere productivity. Tech leaders of Indian descent have been building bridges for decades, uniquely positioning them to lead the digital enterprise into a cloud-first, cyber-secure, hybrid-work future.

The inaugural Zscaler Indian-origin CXO Summit, “Inspiring, Connecting, and Elevating the Indian-origin CXO,” brought together security, infrastructure, and business leaders for a session of engagement, community, and thought leadership. Speakers included the man who transformed the Microsoft application suite, Rajesh Jha; acclaimed innovator and author of Exponential Organizations Salim Ismail; and scholar and thought leader Professor Jagdish Sheth, author of “The Global Rule of Three.”

Here are some of the key takeaways. (Watch the recording here.)

The Indian CXO’s mandate? Build a culture of innovation...and a supportive community.

Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry opened the event with remarks on “Building a Culture of Innovation: The Indian CXO’s Mandate.” Jay told of his experience seeking opportunity in the west, both as a student and as a young tech professional. Citing Zscaler as an example, Jay also shared best practices for sourcing work -- particularly development -- to India, noting it as just one way tech leaders of Indian origin can support each other and build community.

“[A]s we learn from each other,” said Jay, “we come up with the ideas that help us, help our businesses, help our career, and [help us] do a better job.”

The cloud is evergreen, person-centric, and essential to secure.

Microsoft EVP for the Office Product Group Rajesh Jha spoke in conversation with his colleague, CVP for Security, Compliance, and Identity Vasu Jakkal. Rajesh talked about the outsized impact the shift to the cloud has had on Microsoft operations. Because it’s relatively novel, noted Rajesh, cloud services deliver new types of product offerings to customers and a wealth of operational information to service providers.

“[A]s customers consume your latest product, you get signals about what's working and what's not working for them,” explained Rajesh. “You get security signals, you get productivity signals, you get collaboration signals. So the evergreen, and the engagement, and the data signal is one core foundational pillar.”

For Rajesh, the second “pillar” of cloud is its ability to provide more personal services, and break out of restrictive, siloed-product thinking: “[I]n Microsoft 365 we think of you as the person that we serve, whether you're in Teams or Outlook, or using third-party applications, whether you're on the phone, whether you're on your desktop, in the future hopefully in a regular conference room, we are really thinking about you because all the signals go to one cloud.”

The third Microsoft cloud pillar? Privacy and security, which can serve every customer, as long as each customer’s privacy is ensured: “[O]ur hope is that the security signal for each one of them benefits from all that you see across without causing any data leakage, any privacy issues.”

Zero Trust is more (much more) than just a marketing buzzword.

In a fireside-chat session on corporate board engagement (“The CIO and CISO Role: Selling the Transformation and Cybersecurity Vision to your Board”), I had the opportunity to speak with Wilson Sonsini partner Raj Judge and Sand Hill East CEO Andy Brown. Both lamented the marketing exploitation of the term “Zero Trust,” but both noted the extent to which it remains important for executive leadership.

“The commonality of Zero Trust is that it has become a buzzword,” commented Raj. “And the first important thing for management is to educate their board in particular, and maybe even themselves to a certain degree on what Zero Trust really is. Because I think people have not really understood what Zero Trust is, and who can actually provide it, and who can't.”

Andy concurred, suggesting buzz phrase-wary CXOs to rely on an industry-standard definition. “Zero Trust has become a euphemism if you don't like euphemisms, and you prefer ‘fact-based,’ I advise everybody listening to go to the NIST framework definition of Zero Trust,” explained Andy, “which lays out exactly what Zero Trust is and is not, versus some of the marketing hype that's out there at the moment.”

The cloud accelerates innovation...and that’s invaluable in a time of COVID.

Krishnan Srinivasan is the VP of Cloud and Compute Infrastructure Platforms for the American retail giant Target. He spoke as part of an industry panel titled “Transforming Applications, Network, and Security for the Digital World” and moderated by Zscaler President and CTO Amit Sinha. Krishnan talked about the agility that the cloud has delivered to Target when the company had to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Internally, while we were going through all this change, we also had to make sure that we had the right scale in terms of our internal IT systems,” said Krishnan. “One example I would give you is adopting Zscaler proxy solutions. I can't tell you how painless it was for us. Just imagine, 300,000 users in Target -- We had to flip from a previous company to Zscaler, and it happened behind the scenes. Zero impact. If you go back...when you want to make such a big change, you're talking six months of planning, of outages, of changes, things don't go well on Day 1, but credit to Zscaler and the team. It was a flawless, flawless execution. We literally flipped the switch for hundreds of thousands of users within a day. Within a week things were up and running.”

In that same panel discussion, Schneider Electric SVP of Global IT Infrastructure and Operations Zach Niboorkar shared a similar story of preserving business continuity with cloud services.

“I'll give you a perfect example [of cloud-accelerated digital transformation],” said Zach, “how Zscaler and Zscaler's ZIA product helped us.” He continued, “We have 140,000 employees across the globe…[When] March 2020 hit, we announced everybody works from home, and now, our environment, our infrastructure was getting taxed...I made a quick decision. Within 24 hours, we deployed Teams full-scale, by doing split tunneling. Instead of moving that traffic through VPN, we were able to egress using ZIA products directly to the Teams platform...The agility, the speed in which we were able to migrate our Skype users from being on-prem to cloud, that was one of the great benefits we got for our business.”

Measure the value of transformative technology in terms of friction reduction, acceleration, and time.

Ramesh Razdan is the Global CIO for consulting firm Bain & Company. In the “Transforming Applications, Network, and Security for the Digital World” panel, Amit asked him how he measures the value of transformative technology. Ramesh recommended tech leaders focus on the tangible value they can create with new technology, and change their departments from cost centers to value-creation engines.

“A lot of people think technology-out,” noted Ramesh. "How do I deploy this solution, this solution, this solution?" rather than thinking about ‘How can I reduce the friction from our people?’ Time is equal to money. For all of us, when people are working hard, working so smart, any friction we can reduce, any acceleration we can provide people, they can spend more time with their family, they can spend more time on the clients, they can spend more time delivering other capabilities for us.”

The true test of leadership? Managing people instead of “stuff.”

Jay sat down with scholar, author, and thought-leader Professor Jagdish Sheth for an insightful talk on “The Global Rule of Three: Strategies to Stay Competitive in a Global World Where the Center of Gravity is Shifting from West to East.” Jagdish shared his three dimensions of leadership: competency, empathy, and passion.

“Competency is just a hygiene factor,” commented Jagdish. “You have to be competent in what you do. But it is not enough anymore. [The] second dimension that comes out, really importantly, is empathy. Empathy is basically a listening skill as opposed to telling...And a third dimension is passion. If you don't have passion, you're going to burn out.”

Good companies fail because they are either unable or unwilling to change.

Jay asked Jagdish for his theories on why many good companies seem ill-prepared for evolving market conditions.

“[R]esearch ultimately pointed at a very simple truth,” explained Jagdish. “Your company is either unable to change when the ecosystem, the external environment, five or six factors have changed, you are unable to change, for whatever reason -- we can say culture, processes, or [is] unwilling to change.” He cited two examples: a startup unwilling to recognize the potential in a new hardware platform, and IBM, which found itself unable to adapt without bringing in new leadership recruited from outside the company.

The future is coming fast, and technology is driving down prices.

Futurist and OpenEXO Founder Salim Ismail provided the second keynote of the event and talked about how disruptive technologies like cloud are accelerating innovation. He examined how technology advances push down product pricing, referencing the examples of electric light, DNA-sequencing, and solar energy.

“In the past, it's always been true that advanced technologies cost a lot,” observed Salim. “And only a big government lab or a big corporation could afford to do R&D, launch new products and services. Today, for the first time in human history, advanced technologies are very cheap. And anybody can pick up a new technology, enter a legacy industry with a beginner's mind, and totally disrupt it. And this is happening across the board.”

We can all help address the pandemic’s impact on the global community.

Jay closed the event with a call to give back. He spoke with Nishant Pandey, CEO of the American India Foundation (AIF), a philanthropic organization with a mission “to empower underprivileged women, children, and youth in India, and to alleviate poverty in India.” To help them respond to the global pandemic, AIF has provided medical supplies to hospitals and communities across India. Zscaler proudly partners with AIF to support its humanitarian efforts. Learn more about AIF here.

The Zscaler CXO Summit series continues June 30th (Americas region) and July 1 (International) with the second episode, “Reducing the IT Carbon Footprint: The Case for Green Security.” Learn more and register at CXOSummit.Zscaler.com.