What every Zscaler investor needs to know about the stock

We often talk about movers, how companies are performing in the stock market, but we don’t always know what these companies do. And more importantly, what do investors need to know? We go behind the ticker:

Zscaler (ZS) is a fast growing competitor in the cyber security and enterprise space, with a market cap of about $17 billion. According to its website, “Zscaler anticipates, secures, and simplifies the experience of doing business for the world's most established companies.”

So what is it? Who’s using Zscaler’s software and services?

Well, the company protects consumer data for Charles Schwab (SCHW), it created work-from-home platforms for government entities like the City of Los Angeles, and built e-commerce infrastructure for giant consumer goods manufacturer, Unilever (UL).

As Zscaler CEO, Jay Chaudhry explained to Yahoo Finance,

"The world has to move to adapt new technologies, like Zero Trust. That's the real answer. Many companies are making progress, and many are behind."

Headquartered in San Jose, California, Zscaler operates in 185 countries around the world, with a workforce of more than 2500 employees. It trades under the ticker symbol (ZS), with shares up 270% since its first day of trading in 2018.

Zscaler’s flagship product is the ‘Zero Trust Exchange,' a cloud platform that’s distributed across more than 150 data centers around the world.

"The way Zscaler was designed, it was assumed that the user could be working from anywhere and applications could be in data center, in factory. It's all in the cloud, so it doesn't matter because in the Zero Trust architecture, we don't put users on the network. We connect them like a switchboard," says Chaudhry.

Like many pandemic darlings, like Cisco (CSCO), Okta (OKTA) and Cloudlfare (NET), the shares peaked in 2021 and have fallen more than 40% over the last year. Despite a poor performance in the stock market, Zscaler’s revenue has grown steadily since the pandemic due to the rise of hybrid work and a widespread transition to the cloud.