The Netskope Cloud Firewall-as-a-Service and SaaS Security Posture Management are new to the platform, while other capabilities have been improved.
Sasi Murthy, VP of product and solutions marketing at Netskope
Security cloud provider Netskope has announced a series of enhancements to their Netskope Security Cloud SASE platform. They include the addition of cloud firewall and SSPM [SaaS Security Posture Management] to the platform for the first time. Remote browser isolation [RBI], was on the platform before, but was previously OEMed, while the new version is native Netskope technology. Netskope Private Access [NPA, a cloud-native ZTNA [Zero Trust Network Access service] has been significantly enhanced as well.
“The Netskope platform has brought some brand spanking new things with a Wow factor, and these new capabilities which we are announcing make them even more important,” said Sasi Murthy, VP of product and solutions marketing at Netskope.
Murthy stressed that the fuller integration of Netskope’s SASE architecture compared to elsewhere in the market, where SASE is still often more of a concept than a solution, differentiates them.
“Businesses have been dumped in the middle of a 5-lane highway and can’t see what’s going in to avoid being hit,” she said. “We are multi-cloud so they can instrument for specific things. For example, they can move Slack to OneDrive but not their personal Slack. We can see the difference while others can not.”
Melissa Nacerino, head of global channels & alliances marketing at Netskope
“Partners moving from on-prem to the cloud are on a journey similar to customers moving towards digital transformation, and they have realized we are further along across our SASE journey than our competitors,” said Melissa Nacerino, head of global channels & alliances marketing at Netskope. “That has made us become even more strategic to our partners.”
Netskope Cloud Firewall is a firewall-as-a-service [FWaaS] offering that has been added to the Netskope Security Cloud platform for the first time.
“It is brand new on the platform, so still has things that will be built out,” Murthy said. As we go forward, we will add more advanced firewall capabilities. What we are offering now is our first set of applications. We are also now offering centralized access control, with a single console and policy engine, as we have now opened up access control to UDP and ICMP to provide the centralized access. This allows traffic to now be set to all ports and all protocols.” This event support includes Netskope Advanced Analytics, which Murthy compared to Apple Watch for a security platform, providing real-time instrumentation.
SSPM, which helps overcome misconfigurations, has also been added to the platform.
“SSPM is not new in the industry, but it is new for Netskope,” Murthy said. “It is becoming much more relevant, as the growth of apps, continues with the average enterprise using 2400 apps.” Netskope SSPM helps users avoid risky misconfigurations and configuration drift, simplify management and compliance, monitor users and administrator behavior, identify risky users, and remediate risks. It has recently been enhanced by the acquisition of Kloudless, a Taiwan-based startup whose SaaS API integration platform brought Netskope additional domain expertise.
Netskope has also integrated its own RBI capabilities into the Netskope Security Cloud, using the isolation and security expertise and domain knowledge of the team they acquired with Randed.
“RBI is new as a native Netskope capability,” Murthy said. “It was OEMed before now.”
ZTNA has always been part of the Netskope Security Cloud, but Netskope Private Access [NPA], a ZTNA service, has been enhanced with this release.
“We have added support for clientless connection, which is idea for managing groups like consultants,” Murthy noted.
Also part of this announcement is the upgrading of Netskope’s NewEdge global data centres, which run the Security Cloud Services. This includes enhancements to Service Level Agreements [SLAs] for its inline services including NG-SWG, CASB, NPA, and CFW, to address traffic processing latency. It also includes the first phase of Netskope Digital Experience Management [DEM]. Enabled on a per-tenant basis and built natively into the existing Netskope Security Cloud, Netskope DEM provides further visibility into usage of Netskope Security Cloud services and traffic traversing NewEdge.
“We now have almost 50 NewEdge centres globally, up from 35-40 at the start of the year, and we continue to add 2-5 a quarter,” Murthy said.
Partner support and enablement tools for the new enhancements are available now, with more to come.
“A full complement of information and training is already live on the portal,” Nacerino indicated. “New partner demand generation campaigns will come out over the next few weeks.”
