Zscaler appoints new ANZ channels head

Zscaler has a new Australia and New Zealand channels head, Foad Farrokhnia.

Based in Melbourne, Farrokhnia will be responsible for further developing and maturing the Zscaler channel in line with the company's growth strategies across Australia and New Zealand. 

At the same time, he will be responsible for growing mutually successful relationships between Zscaler and its ecosystem of alliance partners, global and local managed service providers, value-added resellers and tier-1 systems integrators.   

Farrokhnia joins Zscaler with more than 18 years' experience of working in the enterprise IT and telecommunications industry across business development, client management, consulting and sales enablement programs.

Most recently, Farrokhnia worked at Telstra based in both Australia and North America. 

During this time he successfully built and drove strategic transformation and enablement programmes in several key leadership positions, including as Americas industry sales director and Global enterprise sales enablement head.

His last role at Telstra was Global enterprise capability and growth head where he worked closely with the organisation's executive team to consult, develop and deliver services that enhanced customer and employee experience.

"We are delighted that Foad has agreed to join Zscaler at this time," says Zscaler Asia Pacific and Japan alliance and channel director Andrew Mann.

"His skill set and experience of working with both growth companies and large multinationals in different geographies will be invaluable as we drive our channel growth and continue to enable Australian and New Zealand businesses to securely transform their networks and applications for a mobile and cloud-first world. In addition, Foad's market knowledge of working with organisations of all sizes within the Telstra channel will be an incredible asset as we continue to enhance our channel programs in the years ahead.

Yesterday, Zscaler announced its intent to acquire Cloudneeti, a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) company to expand its Cloud Security Platform capabilities to data protection.

The joint services of the two companies can provide include:

• Complete Data Protection and Exposure Prevention: Data protection policies apply across locations, users and application types to ensure consistent and comprehensive data loss prevention in compliance with regulations like GDPR.
   
• Unified Compliance Assurance: A single platform that provides compliance visibility and violation mitigation across SaaS applications like Microsoft Office 365 and cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to ensure government laws and industry regulations are followed.
   
• Automated Risk Reduction: Automated remediations that ensure cloud applications are not vulnerable to outside threats by following industry and organisationally-defined policies.