Cutting-edge Data Security Innovations at Zenith Live '25

For access to Zenith Live Keynote videos, along with these innovations, visit the Zenith Live Replay Portal, or this Day 2 Data Security Keynote by VP of Product Management, Venkat Krishnamoorthi

At Zscaler’s annual user conference, Zenith Live 2025, the future of data security took center stage with groundbreaking announcements that reinforce Zscaler’s position as the leader in innovation. As the AI and digital landscape continues to evolve, Zscaler unveiled transformative new capabilities that redefine how organizations discover, protect, and manage sensitive information against emergent risks.

Here’s what was announced, and what we’ll explore in this blog:

• Unifying DSPM and Gartner’s SSE: The future of data security, this new approach helps understand and control your data universe like never before.
• LLM Classification: Harness AI-powered natural language processing to identify new types of sensitive data—rapidly emerging as an essential complement to regex.
• Microsoft Copilot Deployment Wizard: Navigate Copilot risks by identifying the blast radius of shared sensitive data with a simplified interface.
• GenAI Visibility Improvements: Gain unprecedented visibility into generative AI prompts and interactions to refine blocking capabilities.
• Zscaler Data Security Copilot: Empower security teams with a virtual assistant to perform faster investigations through intuitive, natural language workflows.

Lets jump into these innovations and see how they solve some of today's leading industry challenges around data visibility and protection.  

To see these innovations discussed live, you can check out the Data Security Keynote directly.

A New Era of Data Security Begins with DSPM and DLP

Before we dive into the “under the hood” innovations, it’s important to take a step back and see how Zscaler is steering Data Security in groundbreaking directions. It all starts with a deliberate and innovative approach to unifying Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP).

With the growing adoption of AI, cloud, and mobility, understanding your data universe has never been more essential. Your data is moving everywhere—and getting there fast. Alongside traditional channels like Web, SaaS, Endpoint, and Email, new avenues such as Public AI, Private LLMs, and Data Lakes are all the rage.

To understand and control this ever-expanding data universe, organizations need uninterrupted visibility paired with comprehensive control capabilities. This is why unifying DSPM with a cloud-delivered, proxy-based architecture makes so much sense. 

DSPM excels at locating and understanding data across environments, while Gartner’s Security Service Edge (SSE) is the industry-approved standard for delivering control across all data channels. In other words, any data protection program needs both, and preferably unified in a way that reduces product complexity, clunky integrations and disjointed policies.  

With Zscaler’s Data Security Platform, both capabilities come together in one centralized location, unified around a single policy. Zscaler’s DSPM, with newly announce on-prem data visibility & AI SPM, allows you to gain comprehensive insights into your data universe across all data environments. 

When combined with Zscaler’s industry-leading SSE, which provides unmatched all-channel data security and control, it removes the complexity of disjointed integrations and fragmented control policies. This holistic platform approach equips businesses with the tools they need to effortlessly discover and secure sensitive data anywhere.

And with the unmatched power of Zscaler’s new LLM Classification (more on this in the next section), the platform becomes the world’s most comprehensive and effective solution for data security—all in one place.

Go Beyond Regex with LLM Classification

Classification is the building block to great data protection, and Zscaler’s new LLM Classification redefines this foundational concept like nothing before it. 

Traditional regular expression (regex) classification is effective for a predefined scope of data based upon signatures, but struggles to find abstract or nuanced data types. To date, this is all we really had to find sensitive data, which we made due with. But with AI, we can rethink this approach and take a significant leap forward.

Zscaler's new LLM Classification, which will be available across Web, SaaS, IaaS and Endpoint, addresses regex gaps by leveraging LLM’s to discover and protect sensitive data that defies categorization. This innovative approach uses language processing to identify unconventional types of sensitive data, such as financial planning documents, medical and manufacturing content, and other complex and abstract formats.  

While there is still a place for Regex, rest assured AI-powered LLM classification is the future of data security and DLP. Organizations can radically improve their visibility into data risks, improve accuracy, and deliver comprehensive visibility that adapts to the unpredictability of modern data and flows

Microsoft Copilot Wizard: Control Oversharing Risks

As generative AI tools like Copilot accelerate workplace productivity, they also introduce previously unforeseen risks. With complete access to all OneDrive data, Microsoft Copilot can easily consume and over share sensitive data to underprivileged users. As organizations deploy Copilot, they need a better way to enforce right-sized permissions and preview labels to ensure oversharing is minimized.  

Zscaler’s Microsoft Copilot Deployment Wizard helps with just this task. By displaying the blast radius of Microsoft Copilot sharing, admins can easily see what sensitive data is over exposed across the organization. IT admins can leverage this functionality not only for visibility but also to perform bulk updates to data missing required Purview Labels. With a few clicks, thousands of data files can be applied with the proper Purview Label, so as to ensure data hygiene and oversharing is controlled.  

With this breakthrough, businesses can safely embrace Microsoft Copilot and ensure proper data hygiene remains safe and secure for all users across the company.   

The Game-Changer Dashboard: GenAI Visibility

A top priority for most IT teams is improved visibility and control over GenAI applications.  Adding to the existing Gen AI dashboard, Zscaler has built additional visibilities that further extend understanding of how users are interacting and using GenAI apps.   

New dashboard visualizations to Zscaler GenAI Security include prompt categorization, which instantly displays types of prompts sent to GenAI apps. This prompt level visibility removes the guess work around AI interactions issued by users.  Instead of having to tediously explore each prompt, admins can now quickly understand usage trends around GenAI Apps. This helps accelerate decisions around what apps should be blocked or allowed, and maybe areas where business focus and internal initiatives should be improved.

Paired with an interactive explorer, and prompt level visibility to actual input prompts, IT teams have everything they need to securely embrace GenAI apps for productivity, without introducing additional data risks.  

Accelerate Investigations with Zscaler Data Security AI Agent

Brand new to Zscaler’s DSPM is the Data Security AI Agent, an intuitive virtual assistant built to simplify investigations with conversational workflows. With natural language capabilities, security teams can identify sensitive data risks or possible breaches in mere moments—transforming tedious search tasks into real-time insights.

By enabling faster hypothesis-driven investigation workflows, Data Protection AI Agent empowers organizations to respond rapidly to data threats, minimize gaps in protection, and proactively monitor high-risk scenarios across environments.

Unified Data Security Platform for the Future

With these innovations, Zscaler solidifies its position as the most unified and comprehensive data protection platform available. By combining powerful AI-driven insights with the scalability of a cloud-first platform, Zscaler empowers organizations to:

• Effectively discover sensitive data with tools like LLM Classification.
• Control risks across generative AI platforms and SaaS applications.
• Automate investigations with Data Protection Copilot.
• Unify protection strategies across channels—from endpoints to public cloud.

Zenith Live 2025 reaffirmed a fundamental truth: data security cannot thrive in isolation. Modern threats require modern approaches, and Zscaler is driving this evolution by enabling organizations to safeguard their future with confidence.

To learn more about Zscaler Data Security, visit our solution page or request a demo. To watch more about these innovations, you can check out these Zenith Live Keynotes:

Main Stage Keynote:  Data Security Innovations
Transformation Keynote:  Data Security Deep-dive and Demos