Zscaler announced plans to acquire Symmetry Systems, a company focused on identity mapping and data access for AI security. The acquisition aims to strengthen Zscaler’s Zero Trust platform with foundational visibility into how AI agents, applications, identities, and enterprise data interact across organizations.
Symmetry Systems has developed “access graph” technology that ingests enterprise-wide access logs from SaaS applications, cloud environments, data stores, and AI systems. The platform uses AI to correlate these interactions into a unified map that shows which identities are accessing specific data and systems and how those interactions occur.
Zscaler said the technology will be integrated with its Zero Trust Exchange platform, allowing enterprises to manage communications between AI agents, applications, and data sources at scale. The company believes that traditional identity and directory-based security approaches are insufficient for AI environments because AI agents operate independently, use temporary identities, inherit permissions, and interact dynamically across systems.
The purpose of this acquisition is to increase organizations’ visibility into AI-driven activity, enabling security teams to understand what data AI agents are accessing, why they are accessing it, and which systems they interact with. Zscaler said that integrating these services will enable automated policy enforcement and anomaly detection when risky or unauthorized behavior occurs.
The combined capabilities are expected to support several new security features for enterprises deploying AI systems, including:
- Gain visibility into what your AI agents can access and what they’ve already accessed.
- Creating least-privilege access policies for human and non-human identities.
- Complete data lineage tracing across AI agents, subagents, and connected tools.
- Real-time anomaly detection with automated zero-trust responses.
- Rapid blast radius analysis if your identity or AI agent is compromised.
Zscaler Chairman and CEO Jay Chaudhry said the acquisition addresses the growing challenge of securing the millions of autonomous AI agents running across the enterprise.
Main quotation:
“As enterprises rapidly adopt AI, old playbooks for managing access built around users and directories cannot scale to millions of AI agents.Symmetry Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange leverages this fundamental visibility to manage agent-to-application and agent-to-agent communications at scale, giving customers the actionable controls they need to securely deploy AI.”
Jay Chaudhry, Chairman and CEO, Zscaler
“Symmetry Systems’ mission is in-depth security research that truly wins customer love. Zscaler is an inspiration on both counts. We believe that the dominant security platform in the AI era will control the flow of information between identities on zero-trust networks. Identity and data become the new control plane for enterprise security because AI disintermediates applications, endpoints, and traditional network perimeters. In this world, traditional security centered around endpoints, applications, or perimeter networks Models are increasingly operating in the wrong direction.” Symmetry Systems and Zscaler are working together to build information flow networks for the AI era. ”
Mohit Tiwari, Symmetry Systems CEO
