ABOUT
BRIAN
Two decades making enterprise security make sense.
I'm Brian Deitch, VP & Chief Technology Evangelist at Zscaler, based in Arizona. Most people in the industry know me as the Cloud God, which is either a compliment or a warning depending on who you ask.
I've been in enterprise security for over two decades. I've watched the perimeter disappear, watched SSL inspection go from fringe to mandatory, and watched Zero Trust become a marketing term that means everything and nothing. My job is to cut through that noise, call out the nonsense, and help people understand what actually matters.
A big part of how I think about evangelism goes back to 2015, when I saw Guy Kawasaki deliver a keynote at F5. Guy was the former Chief Evangelist of Apple Computer, so I knew he was going to be good. I just did not know he was going to rewire the room.
I walked in expecting a boring talk. I walked out with a different operating system.
Guy changed my life that day. Truth be told, I think he changed everyone at F5 in one degree or another. The way we spoke. The way we shook hands. The way we wrote emails, smiled at customers, and built presentations. It was wild. He did not just give a keynote. He handed everybody a better version of how to show up.
His book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actionsbecame a framework for how I think about influence, trust, storytelling, and impact. Great evangelism is not about pitching harder, yelling louder, or putting more buzzwords on a slide until everyone's soul leaves their body. It is about helping people believe in a better future before they can fully see it themselves.
In 2023, I finally Googled Guy and sent him a thank-you note. It basically said, “You don't know me from Adam, but you changed my life, and I thought you should know.” He actually wrote me back, shared his contact information, and was exactly what you hope someone like that would be: generous, thoughtful, and flat-out amazing.
Since that day in 2015, I've considered Guy a mentor from afar. His work helped shape how I communicate on stage, how I challenge conventional thinking, and how I try to make complex technology feel urgent, human, and real.
At Zscaler, I work with CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and CROs to understand why architecture decisions made in 2005 are still haunting them today, and what it actually takes to move to a cloud-first, identity-centric security model.