Charles Lyons-Burt 
With a childhood spent as an “Army brat” to his servicemember father, Andrew Schnabel was primed to make warfighter enablement and protecting American interests his life’s calling.
Who Is Drew Schnabel?
Drew is a leader working to ensure government agencies and federal systems integrators can take advantage of cloud technologies securely, to empower their teams, meet their missions and deliver exceptional citizen services. Drew is an active participant in the federal and Department of War community, and currently serves as an AFCEA International board member. Coming from a military family, he is a longtime supporter of the military and transitioning veterans, and is the executive sponsor of Vets@Zscaler.
Prior to Zscaler, Drew served as vice president of sales for U.S. public sector and director of Department of War sales at Riverbed Technology. He also worked as an account manager at NetApp supporting the U.S. Southern Command, U.S. Central Command and the Army southwest Asia communities and has held roles in support of various government contracts at EDS and Unisys.
Where Does Drew Schnabel Work?
Drew serves as the geo vice president of Zscaler U.S. Government Solutions. In this role, he focuses on working with his team to ensure agencies can achieve a true zero trust approach in providing secure access for users regardless of device, location or network.
What Does Zscaler Specialize In?
Zscaler specializes in securing and protecting users, workloads and applications.
Schnabel told us in a Spotlight interview that “I’m passionate about supporting the security of our nation and Zscaler’s role in that mission. Securing and protecting our federal government is critical in today’s world where technology and AI is constantly evolving. Zero trust has become an imperative, and it’s been quite a journey implementing zero trust architectures across the federal government.”
ExecutiveBiz: How has the GovCon industry changed since you began your career?
Schnabel: The industry has definitely grown. When I started, everything was more hardware– and software-based. Cloud really changed the way the government does business. It went from cloud, then zero trust became a buzzword, and now everything is AI. Every company, organization and agency is figuring out how they’re positioning themselves from an AI perspective — whether that’s using AI to get intelligence out of information or using it from a defensive posture. Everything is positioned around AI.
Zscaler uses a significant amount of AI in its platform to maintain a secure posture for our customers.
EBiz: And what’s your take on the market now, especially with the changes we’ve seen this year under the new administration? How are you adapting?
Schnabel: We’re still right in the middle of it. If you understand what Zscaler does, we sit at the core of cybersecurity. We’re a policy enforcement point. We securely connect users to applications and workloads, so we’re square in the middle of the cybersecurity spectrum.
The latest disrupter in the market is AI.. Zscaler has been at the forefront, where not only have we have AI built into our platform, but we have also developed a generative AI tool for our customers to help secure and protect against data exfiltration. If users are leveraging AI tools and apps — like ChatGPT or anything else — we can secure and protect organizations from having data leave the environment. It’s a really cool tool, it’s taken off, and federal agencies have started to adopt it, which is encouraging.
So yes, everything is “AI, AI, AI.” If I had a dollar for every time it came up in a briefing, I’d be a rich man. Zero trust is still right in the middle of that conversation too.
As far as Zscaler adapting, we were already in position. Being able to adjust — or already be aligned with where the market is going — is good for the company and adds value to our customers.
EBiz: What types of innovation in contracting vehicles are you seeing?
Schnabel: We’re seeing a lot of innovation around other transaction agreements, or OTAs. Those are becoming the “easy button” from a contracting perspective. The challenge is that procurement shops and contracting arms can’t keep up with how fast technology is changing. Things are moving so rapidly that they’re far behind, and the easiest thing for them to do is stick with what they’ve been doing.
With the new administration, I expect we will all see significant shifts around government policies to speed procurement and drive efficiencies. It’s important because we in industry have incredible capabilities we should be extending to our federal customers, but speed to procure or get authorized is slowing down the time to market. There’s also the speed-to-adoption challenge, and then the recent shutdown.
So the dynamics keep shifting. The good thing for us at Zscaler is that we’re a known quantity and a needed one. We’re essential. If you’re a “nice to have” technology right now, you’re not in a great spot.
EBiz: Where are you seeing the most exciting opportunities to deliver better capabilities to warfighters? How are you and Zscaler harnessing those opportunities?
Schnabel: As Zscaler has grown, we’ve certified and authorized our platforms up the stack. When I started at Zscaler back in 2019, we were already FedRAMP Moderate. We then moved to FedRAMP High, then to IL5 on the NIPRNet for DOW — unclassified but controlled data. What’s exciting now is not just adding new capabilities like the genAI solution I mentioned, and moving into classified environments. Customers want us to continue moving up the stack.
We’re building out classified solutions today. We have two contracts to deliver classified capabilities for the Department of War, and we’re working through the technology enhancements needed to secure and protect users without placing them on a traditional network. That means bespoke access and direct access to applications and workloads on the classified side — moving from IL5 to IL6 in the Secret region and then higher. We’re in discussions across the intelligence community and DOW about that. It’s where we’re taking our business, and it’s exciting. I have support all the way up to our CEO and board on delivering for the high-side mission.
There’s a lot of work to get there. We obtained our facility clearance in September 2024, which took a lot of effort. We stood up a subsidiary in January 2022. All of that was prep work. Now we’re moving the capabilities into the environments, dealing with government red tape and stabilizing the code since you never know how it will react once it’s deployed. But it’s exciting work, and we’re building the team to meet the demand we know is coming.
EBiz: How long has Zscaler been around? Was it new when you joined?
Schnabel: Zscaler started in 2007. Our founder and CEO, Jay Chaudhry, launched the company because he saw the shift to mobility and the cloud. He asked, “Why does security have to sit in a data center on appliances? Why can’t we move security to the cloud?” That was the premise.
Zscaler stands for the “zenith of scalability,” and you can’t support the largest customers in the world without being able to scale globally. All of our customers — agencies, organizations, enterprises — are global. You have to be able to support their missions anywhere.
When I joined in 2019, we had about 1,000 employees. Today we’re around 9,500. Massive growth. The company went public on NASDAQ in 2018, and we continue to invest to support our customers.
EBiz: Any thoughts on CMMC 2.0, which rolled out this month? How is Zscaler complying, and what’s your perspective?
Schnabel: We’re already CMMC compliant, and we’re staying aligned as the policies evolve. Our internal compliance team ensures we’re keeping pace with CMMC changes. Externally, we support our customers on their journey. We have teams focused on small and large aerospace and defense companies, and we know more than 500,000 government contractors need to become CMMC compliant.
We’ve been talking with DOW about building a practice at Zscaler to support CMMC as a service. Zscaler can help these companies on their journey — we don’t do everything, but we do zero trust access better than anybody. We’d rely on ecosystem partners to help build a full service model for the DIB.
We take this extremely seriously. We’re evolving as CMMC evolves, and we’re supporting our GovCon customers every step of the way. Many of the largest household names are Zscaler customers today as they move toward CMMC compliance.
