Netskope

Netskope was founded in 2012 by Sanjay Beri (current CEO), Lebin Cheng, Ravi Ithal, and Krishna Narayanaswamy with an initial venture capital of approximately $21m.[5][6] In October 2013, one year after being founded, Netskope launched its first openly available security software.[6] In that same month, it announced the formation of an advisory team and appointed Enrique Salem, former Symantec chairman and CEO to its board of directors.[7] In 2014, Netskope raised $35m in funding.[8] By mid-2015, the company announced plans to expand to the Australia and New Zealand market and in September, Netskope raised a further $75m in a round led by Iconiq Capital.[9]

In 2016, the first two patents were issued to Netskope - Patents 9,270,765 and 9,398,102 for security for network delivered services.[10][11] In June 2017, Netskope closed the most successful funding round yet, securing $100m in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.[12] The following month, Netskope acquired Sift Security, also a software company with a focus on next-generation cloud infrastructure security.[13] The acquisition brought Sift’s IaaS ‘Cloud Hunter’ into Netskope’s Security Cloud.[14] A year later, in June 2018, Patent 9,928,377 for context-aware data loss prevention was issued to Netskope.[15] 2018 also saw another round of funding for Netskope, as the company raised a further $168.7 in November.[2][16]

In 2019, former Citrix and Fortinet executive Drew Del Matto was appointed CFO of Netskope.[17] In February 2020, just before the release of the Netskope Private Access solution to the general public, the company raised $340m in additional investment in a round led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities.[14][18] This brings the funding to-date to a total of $740m.[19]

As of February 2020, the company is valued at almost $3 billion – having tripled its valuation over the period of 15 months.[17][19] Overall, Netskope has experienced an average of 80% year-over-year growth in number of customers, which include 25% of the Fortune 100 companies.[20]

Netskope has been named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers and made the Forbes Cloud 100 list.[2][21]

In September 2020, Cybersecurity and Exclusive Networks have signed a distribution deal with Netskope. The arrangement would dramatically help the growing company demand for the Netskope Security Platform.[22]

The Netskope cloud security platform is aimed at providing enterprises with threat protection, data loss protection, visibility, and real-time insights across cloud services, including Microsoft’s Azure platform, Google Cloud, and Amazon AWS.[1] API-supported applications include Cisco WebEx, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive, Gmail, Microsoft OneDrive, Office 365, Salesforce and SharePoint, Slack, among others.[23]

Netskope software is delivered as a SaaS (software as a service) solution, via a distributed cloud in SOC-2 and SOC-3 data centers. The solution steers cloud and Web traffic to a cloud-native service for the purposes of inspection and policy enforcement. Clients of Netskope log into the software via a web browser interface where they can access reports and analytics on cloud, cloud usage, compliance, and set policies to control and secure specific usage behavior or alert an administrator.[24]

Netskope offers different deployment options for traffic steering for analysis and policy control. These include log ingestion, API connectors, an agent-less forward proxy, reverse proxy, as well as a thin client (“agent”) and profile for remote users on PCs or mobile devices, and GRE and IPsec tunneling. Netskope can enforce policies including data loss prevention (DLP), anti-malware, encryption, access control, and incident management services on the cloud and web traffic it inspects.[25]

The platform includes a cloud-native solution named a Next Generation Secure Web Gateway – unifying Netskope’s original CASB inline technology with inline web gateway, advanced threat protection and data loss prevention services.[26] In July 2019, Netskope implemented NewEdge into its platform – a global network infrastructure providing high-capacity and low-latency to enable a positive user experience from anywhere. NewEdge provides real-time security that is delivered using an SDN overlay. At the time of release, NewEdge had 50 points of presence, totaling over 100Tb/s total capacity.[27]

Secure access to private enterprise applications was added with the Private Access product, first introduced in June 2019 and made generally available in February 2020.[26]