RESEARCH

This multi-stakeholder digital initiative is dedicated to advancing national cyber-resilience, protecting sectors and assets essential to India’ s economic and national security, including telecommunications, banking and energy, while accelerating trusted AI adoption across India’ s rapidly expanding digital ecosystem.

India has long been a key hub for Zscaler’ s technology innovation and cyber-research, with a significant share of its research talent based in the country. The research centre will expand these operations into a national platform for collaboration between the private sector, public sector, academia and government.

The centre is designed‘ In India, for India,’ with the goal of strengthening the nation’ s cyberdefences and building a future-ready talent pipeline to support India’ s progress toward Viksit Bharat and a secure, digitally self-reliant future.

India is in the midst of a generational Digital Transformation, building systems at population scale across critical sectors and dramatically expanding the national attack surface. At the same time, the threat landscape is evolving rapidly, with nation-state and financially motivated attackers increasingly leveraging AI to probe, target and weaponise vulnerabilities.

Zscaler’ s research arm, ThreatLabz India, has observed millions of infiltration attempts each month, including nation-state cyber espionage campaigns linked to regional geopolitical tensions, large-scale intrusion attempts targeting Indian entities and increased zero-day exploit activity across multiple industries.

As threats grow in sophistication, traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer adequate and disruptions to essential services can threaten national economic stability, reinforcing the need for secureby-design architectures to protect national digital systems.

As founding members, Zscaler and Airtel will combine global intelligence with

The centre is designed‘ In India, for India,’ with the goal of strengthening the nation’ s cyberdefences and building a futureready talent pipeline to support India’ s progress.

local operational reach to create a stronger research-to-response loop. Zscaler will deploy a specialised threat research team leveraging insights from the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform, which processes over 500 billion daily transactions, while Airtel will contribute visibility across IoT and mobile traffic to support monitoring and solution development.

“ At Airtel, our commitment has been to safeguard our customers and the nation’ s digital fabric. This partnership with Zscaler marks a significant extension of this commitment that will combine the power of our AI capabilities and deep scale for cybersecurity research to protect the country’ s expanding digital ecosystem,” said Gopal Vittal, Executive Vice- Chairman, Bharti Airtel.

“ India is building digital systems at an unmatched population scale. You cannot secure this level of ambition with legacy firewalls and VPNs that were never designed for a hyper-connected world. It demands a modern Zero Trust architecture that is secure-by-design,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO, Chairman and Founder, Zscaler.“ With the AI and Cyber Threat Research Centre – India, we will bring the full power of the world’ s largest security cloud to protect the nation’ s public and private sectors.”

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