Ransomware. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Data theft. You might think any of these were the most serious threat facing enterprise networks today. But if Netskope Field CTO Gerry Plaza is to be believed, it is inertia which is the real enemy and one which leaves the door wide open to all of the above.
Founded in 2012, Netskope offers a cloud-based secure access services edge (SASE) platform. In an interview with Silverlinings, Plaza noted the old hub and spoke model of point-to-point connections is dead and for all intents and purposes the internet and cloud are the new corporate backbone. But the cloud is everywhere and that means enterprise security needs to be too. Unlike the environments of old, though, not all connections are created equal.
Adaptable policy vision
“Really the vision architects need to have is how do we create adaptable policies,” Plaza told Silverlinings. “The idea that we always used to architect for ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ needs to evolve to contextual awareness. I need to build context around the users so that I can implement and deliver the right policy at the right time to the right location.”
That means a user accessing the network from a corporate laptop in the corporate office might be granted unfettered access to the company data they need, while a user signing on from a personal tablet on home Wi-Fi might have limited data access. In essence, that’s the idea behind zero trust: not assuming a user is who they say they are just because they entered the right password.
By implementing contextual awareness, enterprises can better protect their data and – by extension – the company. But getting them on the path to doing so is a hurdle in its own right, despite constant headlines about corporate attacks, Plaza said.
“Our biggest competition is the idea of doing nothing…the idea of this is the way we’ve always done it and so let’s just keep doing it,” he explained. “There’s a big hack almost every day. The problem is a lot of customers think, just like we do as normal people, oh that’s not going to happen to me…. until it happens to them.”
Of course, Plaza and Netskope aren’t raising the red flag out of the goodness of their hearts. The company is among the cadre of secure access service edge (SASE) vendors chasing a portion of what is expected to become a $36 billion-market opportunity by 2025. Already in 2023, SASE revenue is expected to hit between $8 billion and $9.2 billion, according to estimates from Dell’Oro Group and Gartner.
And this January, Netskope raised another $401 million from investors to expand its business, adding to the $300 million it raised in 2021. According to CrunchBase, it has secured a total of $1.4 billion in all. That’s all to say it has a lot riding on enterprise adoption of cloud-based SASE architecture.
Which is likely why Plaza advocated for a holistic platform approach to network security when asked to describe what enterprise architects should look for in a security solution. A platform just like the one Netskope offers, which integrates a combination of different security features in a way that lessens the lifecycle burden on IT staff.
Indeed, unified security solutions are a real trend. In December, Dell’Oro Group’s Mauricio Sanchez told Silverlinings sister site FierceTelecom that while disaggregated solutions make up nearly 90% of the SASE market, unified implementations are growing at a 7 to 1 ratio.