Netskope – Security Transformation For Digital Transformation

Recently I sat down with Sanjay Beri, the founder, and CEO of Netskope. Sanjay is a leader who looks to “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” I feel like I can use the overused immortal words because Sanjay grew up in Toronto, plus a decade ago, he envisioned widespread use of cloud applications and enterprise internet access from anywhere a lot faster than most anticipated.

Netskope – born in the cloud

In 2012, Netskope was a company founded on a core belief that people and companies should be able to securely collaborate and work safely across the cloud, web, devices, and multiple locations.

Once upon a time, all infrastructure and data were within the walls of a data center. The role of security was to protect the perimeter. Life was simple back then – a castle and a moat. There is no perimeter to defend in the cloud-first, work-anywhere world we live today. Security needs to follow the data, and a virtual enterprise edge (or enterprise on-ramp to the Internet, cloud, and private apps, as Netskope called it) is required.

Netskope built architecture from the ground up to comprehend remote and mobile traffic, non-browser traffic, and data moving to and from the cloud. The emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) were the early use cases for the cloud security platform.

Digital transformation will fail without security transformation

Now that digital transformation has become a business imperative, with the cloud as its foundation, the Netskope cloud-native, cloud-scale security platform has come of age.

Critical data now resides in cloud services outside the physical data center perimeter. Employees are more mobile and less tied to the corporate headquarters. Employees might be working from home or in a coffee shop and need to access work applications that now reside in the cloud from a laptop or smartphone. Traditional network security controls for a data center cannot adequately secure the cloud and mobile world.

Direct-to-net (sometimes referred to as Split Tunneling) is becoming the norm for most IT organizations. Direct-to-Net allows employees to access the Internet and…