Netskope expands its original Cloud Security platform to also handle Web security from the Cloud, to provide customers with a comprehensive security offering available through Netskope’s partner ecosystem.
Los Altos CA-based Netskope, which has been a focused leader in the cloud access security broker [CASB] space, has moved beyond its roots. The company has announced the general availability of Netskope for Web, an expansion of its original Netskope Cloud Security platform.
“We are a leader in the cloud security space, that was founded five years ago, and has gone gangbusters since,” said Amol Kabe, VP of Product Management at Netskope. “When the company was started, the goal was to deliver CASB solutions, and that was used to build the platform. Now we are announcing an extension of the platform to provide for Web as well as for Cloud.”
Kabe said that this move was requested by enterprise customers, who want a single unified architecture to secure all their Cloud and Web applications, from any endpoint.
“From the enterprise point of view, the world has been turned upside down by cloud,” he said. “Because we have a completely Cloud-native solution, it became obvious to enterprises that they could simplify things if our solution were extended, to address the broader security challenges from both a Cloud and Web perspective.”
Kabe noted that Netskope for Web has been in beta for six months, and was oversubscribed because of demand.
“The customer sees this as a very simple way to tackle all their security with one platform, one policy, one threat protection engine, and one data loss prevention [DLP] engine, all delivered from one Cloud, to Cloud, hybrid or on-prem deployments,” he said.
Netskope for Web’s Netskope Threat Protect feature is powered by the same data loss prevention and threat protection that Netskope has used to protect Cloud services. It provides multi-layered threat protection, including advanced heuristic analysis and dynamic sandbox analysis. Netskope Data Protect provides DLP for both Cloud and Web across more than 1,000 types, using more than 3,000 data identifiers, and including advanced features such as fingerprinting, proximity analysis, and metadata extraction. The platform also features an advanced, real-time analytics engine that both provides the visibility to understand Web usage, and also analyzes individual security incidents.
Netskope will take the offering to market through its partner channel.
“We sell nearly 100 per cent through the channel,” Kabe said. “We have teams that help figure out local market dynamics, but fulfilment is through the channel – that has been the case from Day One. We have partners who deliver to the whole market, from the SMB to the Global 2000. 45 per cent of the Fortune 100 are customers, but we have tons of smaller customers as well.”
Covering such a broad swath of the market means that Netskope has a comparatively large channel.
“We have partners who are purely cloud, as well as traditional security partners,” Kabe said. “Many partners straddle both, and those have actually been the most fruitful for us. As a fast-growing company, we are always expanding, but we don’t expect the relative composition of the channel itself to change with Netskope for Web.”
The move into Web security expands Netskope’s Total Addressable Market, but also makes competitors out of many vendors with whom Netskope previously had a co-operative relationship. Kabe said that Netskope will continue to have an aggressive partnering strategy with other vendors, and that they don’t expect the new platform to change that at all.
“There is always some amount of co-opetition,” he said. “We have a long list of vendor partners who want to partner with us from a technology, go-to-market and channel perspective. We will continue to actively seek new endpoint partners, and folks like Carbon Black have expressed an intertest in partnering with us.”
Kabe said that Netskope’s partners should be excited about their move beyond a point solution to a more comprehensive offering.
“Enterprises demand solutions that are differentiated and provide comprehensive security for the new world of today, he said. “We are the proven solution that addresses security challenges, and now we allow organizations to be able to consolidate and simplify everything on the one platform.”
