Jay Chaudhry[2] (born August 26, 1958)[3] is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of cloud security company Zscaler.

Chaudhry was born in Panoh, a village in the Una district of Punjab (now Himachal Pradesh), India with a population of 800.

[6] In an interview, Jay recalled that he used to walk nearly 4 km every day to attend high school in Dhusara, the neighboring village and, because there was no electricity, he often studied outside under a tree.

[7] Following the completion of high school, he earned a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering from Indian Institute Of Technology, Banaras Hindu University.

The idea for CipherTrust came from his work at SecureIT, where he became familiar with the types of security issues, vulnerabilities and attacks that were possible.

[31] In an interview, Jay discusses why a modernized approach to cybersecurity is needed and the purpose behind the creation of Zscaler technology: Firewall companies were invented about 30 years ago in the early nineties.

The company’s cybersecurity solutions use context such as a user’s location, their device’s security posture and the content being exchanged to determine whether it’s safe to grant access to an application.

When applied as part of the Zero Trust Exchange platform, this system greatly reduces an organization’s attack surface and prevents lateral movement, thus ensuring greater cybersecurity protection.

Jay summed up Zscaler's business in a media interview, "Today, over 40% of Fortune 500 companies depend upon us.

When you communicate ... to the internet or SaaS applications or your apps in Google Cloud, Azure, AWS data center, they all go through us.

My obsession is really to make sure that the internet and cloud are a safe place for everyone to do business.”[35] On having conviction and never giving up: “I tell you what I learned at IBM was to take rejection nicely.

[42] In 2023, he donated $1 million to the Sankara Eye Foundation, an organization whose mission is to eradicate curable blindness in India.