How SASE Supports NIST CSF 2.0 Compliance

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s widely used Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) provides organizations with a common language that allows staff at all levels—and at all points in a supply chain—to develop a shared understanding of their cybersecurity capability. 

In February, NIST trumpetted CSF 2.0, finalizing the framework’s first major update since its creation in 2014. The most significant updates being a new “Govern” function that precedes and also informs all the other functions, and the introduction of Community Profiles, providing shared baseline outcomes for specific sectors or threats that organizations can use to develop their own security profiles. These changes reflect the framework’s evolution and the ongoing need to adapt in the cybersecurity world. Here at Netskope, we’re right on top of these updates, ensuring our contributions are in sync with the latest standards.

So, let’s talk about getting NIST CSF certified. Spoiler alert: It’s no quick fix. It’s a journey that spans several months to a year. As you gear up, you want your security vendor to work with you from the beginning to help you understand your “Current Profile” and support you in designing and achieving the best “Target Profile” for your organization. That’s where Netskope stands out. We know exactly what our unified SASE platform, Netskope One, brings to the table. We’re transparent about where we excel, where we partner with other platforms, and where you might need a bit extra to fully comply. Because let’s face it, NIST compliance isn’t one-size-fits-all, and no single product ticks all the boxes.

How Netskope Helps with NIST CSF 2.0

We have done a deep dive into the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, and we now have a useful resource to offer–the Netskope NIST CSF 2.0 compliance guide. Think of it like a roadmap, breaking down each of the framework’s functions and subcategories (Govern, Identify, Detect, Respond, Protect, and Recover) and explicitly listing out where Netskope assists in compliance. Some we nail completely, others we contribute to significantly, and there are even some where our SASE platform provides insights to help you out, even if we’re not core to the action. We’re all about transparency and honesty here–not spin, bluster and over-promises. This is how we build trusted partnerships.

Let’s get into a little more of the detail to give you a taste of what the compliance guide will tell you.

Govern

The Govern function is a critical first step in your cybersecurity strategy, establishing a solid foundation for managing risks by ensuring clear policies and roles are set up and communicated across the organization and supply chain.

While Netskope does not directly help in establishing Risk management objectives, Netskope One CASB and Public Cloud Security solutions are game-changers in enhancing risk management by auditing web and cloud applications, providing risk scores for over 85,000 cloud apps, and ensuring compliance through supply chain insights. With reverse proxy capabilities and zero trust network access (ZTNA Next), Netskope protects cloud applications and manages internal and supplier access to organizational assets. Policies can then be configured or automated based on cybersecurity risk levels, allowing, blocking, or coaching users to ensure these policies are communicated, understood, and enforced. Netskope provides analytics and reporting to highlight high-risk activities and application risks, and machine learning capabilities to identify and promote good behavior while recognizing new risk traits, enhancing overall security awareness and management.

Identify

You have to know what you’ve got in order to be able to protect it. While Netskope doesn’t map to every Identify subcategory (such as physical devices inventory or cybersecurity roles and responsibilities), it shines in other areas. It contributes significantly by providing detailed analytics, reports, and dashboards for software platforms and inventory to characterize SaaS, IaaS, and web usage across an entire enterprise, mapping communication and data flows to an exceptional degree of accuracy, and external information systems cataloging. In essence, Netskope provides the visibility of managed and unmanaged SaaS, IaaS, and web applications for a comprehensive understanding of your assets, governance controls, cybersecurity risk landscape.

Protect

Protection is the shield against threats, and Netskope stands tall in this area thanks to our strong background in data protection. Netskope manages identities and credentials by integrating with third-party identity providers like Okta, Ping, Google, and Microsoft, supporting SAML, SSO, and MFA. It ensures network integrity by replacing traditional VPNs with Netskope ZTNA Next, adhering to zero trust principles suitable for the borderless network era.

Netskope’s comprehensive data loss prevention capabilities safeguard data in transit anywhere in the enterprise, including when flowing to and from remote users, and even between managed corporate applications and personal unmanaged instances of the same app. By managing remote access, permissions, and authorizations, Netskope ensures that your digital assets are protected with the highest standards of access control and integrity.

Detect

Detection is about keeping your eyes open and Netskope One does just that. Though it does not directly map to every subcategory, the real-time visibility of users, the web, applications, and cloud services provided by Netskope Intelligent Security Service Edge (SSE) (with real-time analytics of behaviors, anomalies and events) are invaluable, contributing to many Detect subcategories. It is also an open platform architecture which integrates with market-leading security services including Splunk, CrowdStrike, Mimecast, AWS, Google, and Microsoft. And it provides SSL decryption, without which a significant amount of visibility would be lost, enabling monitoring and policy enforcement of corporate assets beyond the corporate network perimeter, with a cloud platform able to understand user activity and encrypted data flows in web, modern SaaS apps, and cloud services, as well as egress traffic with inline proxy, firewall, and IPS network defenses.

Respond

In the face of a cybersecurity incident, response time and efficiency are critical. While Netskope may not cover subcategories like response planning, Netskope does capture and display key data points that are critical for forensic investigations including activity-level detail for traffic analyzed for web, cloud, network, and device access, and the file-content details of DLP violations to determine root cause of incident both from an insider or external threat actor. Moreover, its capabilities in investigating notifications from detection systems and inline policy controls mean organizations are able to contain incidents by applying additional restrictions in the event of an incident. Netskope One supports many Respond subcategories, demonstrating the role of Netskope as a key player in orchestrating a swift and effective response strategy.

Recover

Recovery is about bouncing back, placing a focus on people and process, and as such technology plays a lesser role here. However, the foundation that the Netskope One platform and its third-party integrations lay in the previous functions supports a resilient recovery strategy. This includes the ability to identify and prioritize critical services based on the intensity of their usage by the organization including devices, web and cloud services and remote access. It’s in the proactive prevention, detection, and response where Netskope truly adds value, setting the stage for a recovery process that’s informed and effective.

Reach Your Target NIST Profile with Netskope

As you begin planning your approach to NIST CSF 2.0, think about the value its clarity provides you in that journey to compliance. Look at how it can help inform your technology choices and seek out technology partners that offer broad but specific coverage across the frameworks categories. Then engage them early on to better understand your Current Profile and steps needed to design and achieve your Target Profile. 

Download the Netskope guide to NIST compliance here, to find out how we map to each subcategory, line by line, control by control, to help you meet the requirements of NIST CSF 2.0.