Filtering the net without delay? No problem says Zscaler

Stuart Corner
Friday, 03 April 2009 00:48

IT Industry - Market

Martens explained Zscaler's approach to filtering and blocking as: "In the area of reputation we thought that an IP address is not a sufficient means of reputation when that might represent dozens of servers and hundreds of thousands of web pages. We don’t believe that is granular enough. So we scan every page and if on that page we find, for example, a Java applet that is trying to access the hard disc and perhaps a username and password field we can build a risk assessment and based on a user's policy decide how to treat that page."

He conceded that this approach "requires an awful lot of grunt," but said: "That is exactly what Kailash as gone out and built...We have what it takes to make this work and we can do what other people cannot."

Zscaler is moving rapidly from start-up product development to global rollout. Martens said Chaudhry had recruited a world wide sales team in February. "He has the funding to fund this entire venture without any venture capitalists. That is very powerful in this day and age. He has very big ambitions for this business...Right now we have 22 nodes around the world. In the last four weeks we have deployed in Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo. We believe this will help us to move forward very quickly."

First Australian node up and running
Zscaler has just configured its first Australian node, in Adelaide, "We will have many nodes in Australia by year end," Martens said. "The reason we can do that is because they are low cost and high performance All we need for a node capable of 10Gbps throughput is two rack units."

In Australia Martens said the company would go to market through resellers, ISPs and telco partners. "I am talking to all the major telcos...It makes a lot of sense to put a node in a telco's network."

He named Generation Eight in Melbourne and Communications Australia in Perth as two early resellers saying the company had a waiting list of prospective customers. "We have resellers in place who are very keen on the products and who are linking up prospects to start evaluations tomorrow...Anything from SMBs to companies with 500-2000 users who are looking to solve the problem of multiple sites that would require multiple appliance. At the top end enterprises are looking for the breadth of security we are providing."

Asked if the company had any plans to extend it services into email filtering, Martens said: "All I can really say is we are capable of very very fast scanning there are all sorts of things that wil allow us to do...[but] today we are a web filtering company."