Kavitha Mariappan, Executive VP, Customer Experience and Transformation, at Zscaler, is responsible for driving global transformation and innovation across all facets of Zscaler’s business, customers, strategy, products and operations, with a strong focus on customer value creation. She is a passionate champion of diversity at Zscaler and in her community. At Zscaler, she co-chairs the D&I team and serves as executive sponsor of WIZE (Women in Zscaler Engage), an internal employee group that helps co-workers advance their careers. She spoke to Intelligent CXO at Zenith Live 2024 in The Hague about the priorities of the CXO community and equality in tech.
What are the top priorities for the CXO community?
One of the most important things for all organisations, whether it’s private sector or public sector, is how prolific the cyberthreat landscape is and there are multiple reasons for that. One is obviously the workforce is more remote than ever. We’re never going back 100% into the office, whether we like it or not.
We’re also seeing a focus on OT so everything that we’ve done with users and devices, we want to be able to do the same for workloads, factories. If you think about it, a lot of OT devices don’t get patched as frequently as IoT. My phone gets upgraded regularly and automatically, but some of these very critical OT devices don’t get their patches for six months, so these all become targets.
The other thing is the geopolitical situation which is also pushing us towards CXOs needing to be much more vigilant on what threat actors are trying to do. These threat actors are getting quite nefarious, and if they’re starting to manipulate or monopolise tools like AI, they are very sophisticated and very targeted, and so CXOs need to be prepared for that.
There are also these mega trends. We’ve always talked about cloud mobility, IoT and we’re seeing AI become a huge mega trend – the United Nations is calling it the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The other element is the data deluge. What do we do with the amount of data that we’re collecting? Now people want to collect this data. The thing about AI is, you need to be sitting on Big Data. There are storage costs, there are privacy concerns – are we storing things that we need to be storing for forensic reasons that we potentially shouldn’t be? How are we securing some of this? And then taking a look at cost cutting – efficiency at the branch, efficiency at the endpoint and really starting to think about how is this amount of traffic traversing our network? And this is where we’re starting to see people wanting to move towards a firewall-less and VPN-less world – this is an attack vector that must be eliminated.
How does a business approach cybersecurity?
What is most important thing – what are your crown jewels? What can you not live without? We begin with that and we begin with what are your business priorities? This isn’t about ‘that is good tech’ or ‘that looks really cool. Let me put AI in place’. Do you need to put an AI initiative in place? Is there a mandate? Are you seeing AI generated threats? Are you seeing them hit more of your Internet-based traffic or your OT-based traffic?
It’s about having empathy for the nature of business. I was meeting with a trucking company in the United States. They do massive freights and their CISO and the CIO are modernising the entire environment. The thing is, the endpoint – the truckers carrying freight – they have CB radios. So how are you going to go to them and start talking about zero trust security and user awareness? There’s a will to do these things at the corporate level, but it has to translate and so these are the things that become impediments to advancement.
It’s a work in progress. Sometimes retiring a certain application is going to cause a lot of angst. And these are the things that cause slowdowns. Having empathy for the CXO is important because we are trying to unstick some of this for them by bringing a community of peers together that are doing it. Having them share these best practices is often probably the best tool, more than us giving them the technology.
Have you seen equality for women in tech improve?
It has improved but there is still a lot of improvement to go. Because I think playing this role requires someone to be multi-threaded, who actually has the ability to juggle multiple things. There is a skillset with a collaborative management and empathetic management, and I’m not saying men are not good at this, but women are naturally good at it and this is why we’re starting to see more and more of them in that seat.
I ran a women in IT and security CXO conference in January – we wanted it to be very small group because really the team and I wanted to keep it intimate so they would be able to really build those bonds and dialogue. It was a technical conference. It’s funny when I was doing my keynote, I get asked all the time, what do women who go to a tech conference do? We talk about tech! But I think all these women looked around the room and went, ‘Wow, look at all the powerful positions’.
Are women CXOs taking a completely different approach?
I’m a trained engineer. There were nine girls out of 300+ boys in the first year of university. When I graduated and when I went to my first job, I was always the only one in the room. I think there is a generational shift that has occurred. You don’t want to be singled out – you want to fit in. At the end of the day, it’s your core competency and how you do work. We all have our individual ways of doing things – men and women. Is there a gender specific trait that makes us different? Perhaps. But I think these women in leadership have come to a place where they have travelled the road, they have embraced it and leaned into it and said this is my unique way of manging, leading and trailblazing.
There are things that I do that are uniquely different because I am a woman CXO. Other than that, there are things that I do because I am a CXO. The common thread there [at the January CXO conference] was also that there is a call for action to advocate and make sure that we are creating opportunities for mid-career women in all organisations in the industry. If we do not do it, it is irresponsible of us.
Would you hear a group of men say I am going to pull a chair out for the other up and coming men within the organisation? Perhaps not. These women were already running initiatives. As an IT leader, is that really their job? Is it a HR thing? Many of us have taken that mantle on as an organic crusade – we have just done it because it needs to get done and we can and we should.