Netskope
Netskope is an American software company providing a computer security platform. The platform offers cloud-native solutions to businesses for data protection and defense against threats in cloud applications, cloud infrastructure, and the web. Netskope is considered a "leader in its field" status for its Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) product from Gartner.

Netskope is based in Santa Clara, California, with a software development facility in Bangalore, India, and further offices in San Francisco, Redmond, New York, St. Louis, London, Melbourne, Leganés and Singapore.

History 
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. In October 2013, one year after being founded, Netskope launched its first openly available security software. 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. In 2014, Netskope raised $35m in funding. 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.

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

In 2019, former Citrix and Fortinet executive Drew Del Matto was appointed CFO of Netskope. 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. This brings the funding to-date to a total of $740m.

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

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

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.

Technology and products 

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. API-supported applications include Cisco WebEx, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive, Gmail, Microsoft OneDrive, Office 365, Salesforce and SharePoint, Slack, among others.

Netskope software uses a SaaS (software as a service) model, delivered via a distributed cloud in SOC-2 and SOC-3 data centers. It steers cloud and Web traffic to a cloud-native service for 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.

Netskope has 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.

The platform includes a cloud-native component named a Next Generation Secure Web Gateway – combining Netskope’s original CASB inline technology with inline web gateway, threat protection and data loss prevention services. In July 2019, Netskope added NewEdge into its platform – network infrastructure with a goal of improving user experience via high-capacity and low-latency. 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.

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.

References

Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Companies based in Santa Clara County, California
Cloud computing providers
Cloud computing
Cloud platforms
Software companies of the United States