Zscaler, a leader in cloud security, in partnership with Bharti Airtel (Airtel), one of India’s largest telecommunication service providers, has announced the launch of the AI & Cyber Threat Research Center – India. This multi-stakeholder digital initiative is dedicated to advancing national cyber resilience, protecting sectors, industries and assets that are essential to India’s economic and national security, such as telecommunications, banking and energy, as well as digital users and 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 Zscaler’s research talent based in the country. The research centre will serve as an expansion of Zscaler’s operations into a national platform for collaboration between the private sector, public sector, academia and the government. The centre is designed ‘In India, For India’, with the goal of strengthening the nation’s cyber defences and building a future-ready talent pipeline to support India’s progress towards Viksit Bharat and a peaceful, secure and digitally self-reliant future.
India is in the midst of a generational Digital Transformation, building systems not at enterprise scale, but at population scale across critical sectors – dramatically expanding the national attack surface. At the same time, the threat landscape is evolving at machine speed, with nation state and financially motivated attackers increasingly leveraging AI to probe, target and weaponise vulnerabilities in minutes. Zscaler’s research arm, ThreatLabz India, has observed millions of infiltration attempts each month.
As threats grow in sophistication, traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer adequate and disruptions to essential services can threaten national economic stability – making secure-by-design foundations and a modern architectural shift imperative to protect national digital systems in an increasingly borderless, AI-enabled environment.
