The rollout marks Zscaler’s latest push into what the company calls the convergence of connectivity and security, a response to growing demand from customers who need to link and safeguard distributed assets such as trucks, traffic lights and rail signalling equipment without building dedicated networks.
Howe said the product roadmap is being shaped directly by conversations with operators and partners, insights he described as “difficult to replicate through market research.” The Zscaler Cellular offering lets customers install SIM cards in devices, automatically routing all traffic through Zscaler’s cloud‑based security stack while supporting seamless hand‑offs between multiple carriers – a feature that proved valuable during recent telco outages in Australia.
The service is already being used in sectors ranging from gas pipelines and energy grids to government facilities. One customer with hundreds of thousands of SIMs discovered previously unknown malicious activity linked to Russian and Chinese actors after directing traffic through Zscaler, illustrating how the platform’s visibility can become a security capability in its own right.
Looking ahead, Zscaler plans to leverage the telemetry gathered from connected devices to trigger automatic policy changes – for example, revoking access if a SIM is moved from an authorized vehicle to an unknown location. The company is also experimenting with deception‑based techniques that would divert suspicious devices to honeypots, allowing security teams to study attackers while protecting genuine applications such as ATMs.
Howe warned that the same artificial‑intelligence tools that power Zscaler’s threat detection can also be weaponised, citing an internal test in which an AI system autonomously built a clone of an application, identified vulnerabilities and attempted to exploit the original. He said organisations must set clear boundaries for autonomous AI to prevent unintended actions.
By turning the massive volume of data – roughly 750 billion transactions processed daily – into actionable intelligence, Zscaler hopes to give critical‑infrastructure operators a continuous, zero‑trust shield that adapts in real time as their physical assets become ever more digitised.