A Leader in Both Security Service Edge and Single-Vendor SASE

Netskope is one of only two vendors positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports for both key categories: Security Service Edge and Single-Vendor SASE. What’s more, the Gartner companion report, Critical Capabilities for Single-Vendor SASE, recognized Netskope as the only Single-Vendor SASE vendor that ranked among the 3 highest scoring vendors in all 3 Use Cases, with the highest score for the Zero Trust Platform Use Case (4.02/5.00).

We believe Netskope’s recognition in both categories shows the strong alignment of our Netskope One platform to how organizations are increasingly adopting SSE and SASE—with increasingly advanced requirements for both security and networking to improve security, accelerate access, and reduce complexity through a converged network and security platform. 

Here’s why this is so important.

The Timeliness of SASE 

The SASE framework was introduced in 2019 in the midst of global cloud and mobility transformation, providing a category name for a convergence trend that had begun many years earlier. The global pandemic starting in 2020 further accelerated the market need for secure, easy, performant, and ubiquitous access to the SaaS, cloud, web, and private applications needed to run a productive business. At the time, the security industry could deliver pieces of what a SASE platform would ideally look like and there were market leaders in specific SASE capabilities such as CASB and SWG. But most vendor offerings then were either incomplete or poorly integrated, undermining SASE’s promise to improve security and user experience while reducing cost and complexity. At the time, many customers understandably viewed SASE as conceptual, even theoretical.

But the industry finally caught up, first through the integration of SD-WAN with consolidated security capabilities in the form of Security Service Edge (SSE), and eventually through single-vendor SASE solutions that converge  SSE and SD-WAN on a single platform. As these nascent solutions have gradually improved and new vendors have entered the market with more mature offerings, organizations are increasingly choosing SASE architecture as a simple and scalable way to stop threats, prevent unauthorized access to apps and data, and guarantee network performance.

But while the choice of vendors capable of delivering a true single-vendor SASE architecture is growing, it’s still a very small list: this year’s Magic Quadrant recognized only nine participants, with ten honorable mentions. Why? Because we think delivering a platform approach to converged security and networking is not as easy as pulling together a series of existing products and acquisitions and labeling it as SASE. To achieve platform capabilities, vendors had to first have the vision of that converged platform, and then spend significant time and effort bringing the various components together as part of a seamless whole. We believe it isn’t enough that all the capabilities are available on a price list; they have to integrate, interoperate, and make the entire architecture simple and more cost effective.

This was Netskope’s vision—and our execution. After being an innovator in SSE capabilities for years, it was a natural evolution to extend our cloud security platform to deliver full SASE. 

Our goal remains to provide a single, integrated solution that, as the market evolves toward a cloud- and AI-centric future, can accommodate new capabilities in an elegant platform architecture rather than mash together a bunch of disparate parts in an attempt to make a “platform.” Those quote marks are deliberate; too many alleged SASE vendors today offer little more than “price list platforms”—all the right capabilities on a price list, but far from usefully integrated, which defeats part of SASE’s purpose.

The Rapid Evolution of the SASE Market and the Magic Quadrant

This Single-Vendor SASE Magic Quadrant is only in its second year, and we feel the major difference between this year’s and last year’s reflects how quickly the market is evolving as more companies embrace SASE as an architecture. As per our understanding, in its first year, this Magic Quadrant focused on a narrow set of SASE use cases: mainly midmarket SD-WAN with a bit of integrated security, sourced from a single vendor. But we think bigger enterprise customers have now started to aggressively consider full SASE (which combines SD-WAN and SSE), and they have advanced needs for both security and networking (for example, significant numbers of branch locations in large retailers). The original “Foundational SASE” use case for smaller customers remains important, and is a part of the market Netskope serves. But it’s only one small piece of the bigger SASE picture.

We believe that’s why, this year, greater emphasis has been placed on more advanced security and networking capabilities, and qualifying vendors also have to be able to support more of those truly next-level requirements, especially advanced cloud, SaaS, web, and private app security, and in varying form factors (software, hardware) depending on customer need. It also coincides with what Netskope has been able to achieve in a short time as far as the growth and maturity of our SD-WAN function and its role in our Netskope One platform.

Netskope One: The Next Evolution of SASE and Zero Trust

We believe our recognition as a Single-Vendor SASE Magic Quadrant Leader means that our Netskope One platform aligns to what Gartner experts saw and analyzed as critical for how companies will buy if they choose to source SASE from a single vendor. Using one console, one engine, one client, one gateway, and one network, Netskope One is a true platform that converges critical security and networking components, not a portfolio or price list of “platform capabilities” that don’t actually fit together. Key pillars of Netskope One SASE include:

One Console. A single point for policy management across all components of the Netskope One platform. The 100% cloud-based, 4-tier multi-tenant MSP-friendly console unifies the management of SSE and SD-WAN across branches, remote sites, multi-cloud environments, and remote users. It includes a built-in SD-WAN controller that separates the control and data planes, providing streamlined and efficient network management.

One Engine. The Zero Trust Engine lies at the heart of Netskope One, facilitating zero trust implementations by continuously gathering risk telemetry about users, devices, applications, transactions, and data to share full risk context across SSE and SD-WAN, enabling adaptive, least-privileged access and optimized connectivity. For example, an enterprise can create a cloud security policy to coach users when using risky apps, and the Netskope One Gateway in the branch can leverage the same risk context to de-prioritize risky app traffic.

One Network. Netskope One SASE resides on NewEdge, the world’s largest, highest-performing security private cloud, offering the industry’s broadest geographic reach, with local processing in every point of presence (POP) and localization support for virtually every country. This ensures high-performance on-ramps to SSE for securing all web traffic, SaaS, and private app traffic, as well as SD-WAN for high-performance access to SaaS and UCaaS. By maintaining our own private cloud we can optimize connectivity and processing to offer customers a best-in-class end-to-end user experience.

One Client. The industry’s first unified SASE client that integrates SSE, endpoint DLP, and endpoint SD-WAN, consolidating multiple agents into a single lightweight client for SASE, zero trust, and remote access use cases. This delivers seamless, secure, and optimized access to web, cloud and private apps, while greatly simplifying desktop administration.

One Gateway. Provides secure, reliable connectivity for every site, cloud, remote user, or IoT device. The Netskope One Gateway consolidates disjointed appliances and offers multiple services such as routing, WiFi, SD-WAN, application firewall, IPS, IoT device intelligence, P-DEM, and edge compute. Additionally, it provides a seamless on-ramp to Netskope Intelligent SSE.

But What About SSE?

A growing number of organizations, including medium to large enterprises, is rapidly adopting single-vendor SASE offerings. In addition, the standalone SSE market will remain robust and continue to grow very healthily, as there will be customers that wish to focus solely on a cloud security platform initially with SD-WAN from another vendor and gradually expand to  single-vendor SASE. The aforementioned pillars of Netskope One SASE, along with the constituent Intelligent SSE and Borderless SD-WAN modules, enables Netskope to meet customers wherever they are on their SASE journey.

Thank You!

We are thankful to our customers, partners, team members, and their families—all of whom have been with us on our journey of innovation every step of the way. We are deeply proud of our team, because as a fast-growing company, you’re either executing excellently and relentlessly, or you’re not—and we definitely are. And we are of course honored that Netskope and our capabilities have been recognized as market leaders. 

I encourage you to read the full 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Single-Vendor SASE report, as well as the upcoming companion report on Critical Capabilities for Single-Vendor SASE. Get your complimentary 2024 Magic Quadrant for SSE report here.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge, Charlie Winckless, Thomas Lintemuth, Dale Koeppen, 15 April 2024.

Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Single-Vendor SASE, Andrew Lerner, Jonathan Forest, John Watts, Charlie Winckless, Neil MacDonald, 3 July 2024.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE, Andrew Lerner, Neil MacDonald, Jonathan Forest, Charlie Winckless, 3 July 2024.

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