This article was contributed by Sanjay Beri, CEO and Founder, Netskope.
As enterprises embrace digital transformation across all facets of their operations, the corporate network is undergoing a massive overhaul. With critical data now residing in SaaS and IaaS services outside the enterprise perimeter, a workforce that is increasingly mobile, and businesses that demand agility, enterprises are revamping network architectures and moving away from the legacy model of routing all traffic through a corporate data center. Direct-to-net has become the mantra for most IT organisations, but security architectures have not kept up with this shift.
While the idea of “cloud security” has been around for more than a decade now, what many of those vendors really sell are cloud-managed products, or cloud-washed products with retrofitted or unscalable architectures. Only in the last five to six years, with the advent of microservices, evolution of containerisation, and maturation of big data architectures has it really been possible to build a truly scalable cloud security platform that can address enterprise needs. At Netskope we were fortunate to have started our journey at a time that allowed us to take advantage of these key technological advances. “Building it right” has been our motto from the start and every design decision we make is made with the end state in mind — a cloud-native, cloud-scale security platform for the modern, digital enterprise.
When we started Netskope over half a decade ago, a core belief that the team and I shared was that people and companies should be able to collaborate without limits, working safely across the cloud, web, devices, and locations. With that in mind, we set out to build a first-of-its-kind platform smart enough to understand and address the challenges created by this new way of working and the corresponding underlying changes in the way applications (and really all of the internet over time) were being built.
This meant a unique architecture that was built from the ground up to understand the new language of the internet and all applications — APIs and JSON — in real time. An architecture that treated remote and mobile traffic, non-browser traffic, and data moving to and from the cloud as “normal,” and not as outliers. SaaS and IaaS were born with these characteristics and were the initial use case for our cloud security platform, but we designed our platform knowing that all internet traffic would eventually look that way too.
Until recently, we have mostly talked about addressing these challenges from a cloud perspective with our market-leading and award-winning cloud access security broker (CASB) and patented Netskope Cloud XD technology, which understands all transactions in extreme definition and performs big data analytics in real time to eliminate blind spots and make policy enforcement simple. We did this because we knew we first had to address the difficult challenges created by the speed with which the cloud had upended enterprise security. Now, with the web becoming a composite of dynamically generated pages that use the same underlying language powering the cloud, our founding vision has evolved and the time has come for us to release the next step of our unified platform, capable of securing both the cloud and web the way it should be done.
As we developed Netskope for Web, we engaged heavily with our customers to understand their security needs and strategies and focused our efforts on their most pressing web security challenges. With more than 30 enterprise customers in our early access program, we’re very excited by the progress we’ve made and the level of customer adoption we’re seeing. Here’s a little more about Netskope for Web:
Built for the modern, dynamic web
Gone are the days when websites used to deliver static content. Accessing a single page today could result in more than 100 HTTP requests — including private API calls, ad networks, page analytics trackers, CDNs, third-party plugins, etc. Powered by Cloud XD, Netskope for Web cuts through the noise to identify actual user activity, assess the risk and enforce appropriate controls.
Comprehensive threat protection
Staying ahead of insidious, ever-evolving threats is a daunting challenge, even for the most sophisticated security teams. With cloud services emerging as a fundamentally new attack vector, the problem has become even more complicated. Blended and multi-channel attacks that straddle web and cloud make it hard to detect the full scope of an attack and perform complete remediation. At Netskope we have built comprehensive, award-winning, multi-layered threat protection to effectively uncover and remediate sophisticated threats. With added intelligence from a renowned in-house threat research team that discovers and names countless cloud threats, Netskope Threat Protect offers comprehensive security for enterprise web access that also integrates with and leverages our large threat partner ecosystem.
Full power of Netskope Cloud Security platform
Designed from the start to address enterprise security needs, the Netskope Cloud Security platform comes with proven capabilities including:
- Award-winning cloud DLP
- A single policy engine that covers SaaS, IaaS, and web with granular controls for consistent enforcement across on-premises and remote users
- Adaptive access control covering managed and unmanaged devices accessing cloud and web
- Real-time, advanced analytics
- Customisable, intuitive user interface
A modern approach to today’s security problems
Our platform-led approach to product development means that all these capabilities are seamlessly available for any Netskope-monitored user traffic, including SaaS, IaaS and now web. The modern, digital enterprise’s approach to security is not about ‘block first, approve later.’ It is about safely enabling employees to be agile and productive irrespective of their physical location. Our cloud security platform enables IT teams to empower their employees without compromising the enterprise security posture across SaaS, IaaS, and web.
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About the author:
Sanjay Beri
Sanjay brings more than two decades of innovation and success in the cloud, networking, and security industries. His unique business sense combined with his technical acumen, vision for the future of the industry, and unwavering focus on culture have contributed to his building a world class team and iconic company as founder and CEO of Netskope. Prior to Netskope, Sanjay was VP & GM of Juniper Networks secure access business unit, driving it to market leadership throughout his tenure. He is also the co-founder of one of the world’s first data center encryption companies, Ingrian Networks, and has held leadership positions across numerous other security and networking companies.
