Geddit? Beri SASE… Santa Clara-based Netskope is run by Sanjay Beri and they have just closed a $340m (£261m) investment round tripling the company valuation from $1bn at the end of 2018 to close to $3bn today.
A massive leap in just 15 months. They are reporting a staggering 80% year-on-year growth and claim to be, according to CEO Beri ‘the fastest-growing company at scale in the fastest-growing areas of cybersecurity: secure access server edge (SASE) and cloud security.’
‘When we started Netskope in 2012, it was clear that the cloud was changing everything, but few saw how it would disrupt security’. Beri did.
What’s interesting about this particular round of investment is that Beri said they didn’t really need the money but when the world’s top private equity houses came knocking, the lure of a ‘legendary set of investors’ was too good an opportunity to turn down.
Led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities – the platinum VC in terms of success stories within the enterprise technology space – new investors include Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and PSP Investments alongside existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Base Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Geodesic Capital and Social Capital. They have, according to Beri, ‘put all their chips behind Netskope for the long-term to dominate the largest market in security.’ It sends out a VERY strong signal to the catch-up players.
‘[Netskope] are raising the bar for game-changers successfully pushing beyond the limitations of existing technology to reshape a market.’
Patrick Fu, Managing Partner, Sequoia Capital Global Equities
Setting The Scene
Way back in October, we reported that Netskope ‘went all SASE’ and prophetically (or not), Jonathan Mepsted, Netskope’s Regional Director for UK and Ireland said that ‘Amazon AWS’s Public Cloud revolutionised computer, storage, data and how people build applications. At Netskope we have the opportunity to revolutionise networking and security for the industry. Revolutionise how Enterprises securely connect to the modern cloud. That’s the vision SASE represents for us.’
We also reported last week in the Okta Businesses@Work report that there continues to show growth in cloud app and platform adoption, aligning with Netskope’s own narrative that today’s split of the average corporate is something like 6% of traffic to static websites, 87% to SaaS platforms and 7% to IaaS providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
By this logic, it’s important for businesses of all sizes to gain contextual insight into application usage – being able to see who’s using what, a visual on the data flow including whether there is sensitive data involved and what device/s are being used to access the apps.
Is Netskope The Complete Platform?
Today, yes. Tomorrow, probably. No-one is getting close to them at the moment which is why we are completely comfortable recommending them and the world’s largest businesses trust them.
Netskope’s Next-Gen Secure Web Gateway (NG-SWG for short) uniquely combines web security, cloud access security brokerage (CASB), legacy VPN, IaaS configuration monitoring, real-time DLP and MPLS type connectivity for remote sites and employees into a single platform.
In addition, they remain the only vendor able to do real-time data loss prevention from devices without performance degradation on their connectivity. For Netskope it’s a significant USP, all driven by their NewEdge technology.
NewEdge is a globally-distributed connectivity network that puts them within 14ms of 85% of the world’s population, catapulting them into the top echelons of connectivity on a global scale. This means that when they’re scanning data in real time against DLP policies there’s no user impact on performance/latency.
And that’s not all. They have released Netskope for Private Access, a cloud-based service for secure access to private enterprise applications in the public cloud and the data centre.
There is no other provider in the market that can offer such a complete service.
Where Are Netskope Going?
Total funding to date has reached the eye-wateringly massive total of over $740m (£570m) and they’re using the money to get to the very top. Arguably they’re already there.
- In the last nine months they’ve opened 26 high-performance data centres
- They have opened state-of-the-art offices in Paris, São Paulo, Seattle, New York, St Louis and San Francisco as well as a new HQ in Santa Clara
- They have expanded globally into Australia, Singapore, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain and Germany
- Employee headcount has risen by over 50% and their leadership team has been boosted by some of the industry’s top talent
It’s no understatement to say that Netskope have the competitive edge and this latest round of investment is a major vote of confidence from the world’s leading private equity firms – firms that don’t give money away without being absolutely sure that they will get significant returns.
And it’s their products that help our clients to find, understand, govern secure and safely enable any cloud or web app, both known and unknown.
They do what they do so you can do what you do knowing Netskope have your back.
Contact us today on info@koncisesolutions.com or call 020 7078 0789 and we’ll talk cloud and email security, communications platforms, cutting-edge IT solutions or whether pineapple on a pizza is grim or great…
Koncise Solutions
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