All these cutting-edge, cloud-based solutions are going to help everyone crunch workloads in no time and turn larger profits — as soon as they can get them past security.

Companies pursuing a cloud-first model are hitting a snafu: “They view their IT folks, their security folks, as the ‘department of no,'” said Amit Sinha (pictured), executive vice president of engineering and operations and chief technology officer of Zscaler Inc.

Sinha spoke about this conflict with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

“There’s this big push from users to adopt newer, nimble, faster, cloud-based solutions that improve productivity, but often IT comes in the way,” he said, adding that traditional security models do a poor job of covering mobile users, in particular.

The traditional “hub-and-spoke” model pulls sprawled branch data back to a central hub over private networks. As users increasingly become mobile and workloads move to the cloud, the hub and spoke is a wonky fit at best, Sinha stated.

Short circuiting security

Sinha explained how Zscaler is enabling a better security model for cloud-first workloads. “We want to sit between users and the destinations that they go to all across the world,” he said.

The company has built a network of 100 data centers across the world to monitor customers’ security without the use of expensive circuits and tedious processes, Sinha said. Zscaler, a cloud-native company, goes straight to the internet through a pervasive security stack delivered as a service.

Sinha said that this transforms the adoption of cloud-first strategies so that companies need not choose between a painful user experience and compromised security.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSA Conference 2017. (* Disclosure: Zscaler sponsored this interview. Neither Zscaler nor other RSA Conference participants has editorial influence over questions asked or content on SiliconANGLE or theCUBE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE