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Patent cements company’s leadership as the only CASB with a complete solution for any use case, including remote usage from mobile devices or native apps
Netskope, the leading cloud access security broker (CASB), today announced that it has been awarded United States Patent 9,270,765 for security for network delivered devices. The patent, the most comprehensive awarded to any CASB vendor, recognizes Netskope’s ability to offer real-time visibility and policy control for unsanctioned cloud app usage, as well as those formally sanctioned by IT, regardless of a user’s location or device type.
“This patent is a testament to our belief that IT needs to rip the blindfold off and not only recognize the massive scope of cloud apps being used in their organization, but also effectively enforce policy across every app, sanctioned or unsanctioned,” said Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO of Netskope. “It’s a product of the vision and extremely hard work put in by our entire team, but I want to recognize my colleagues Krishna Narayanaswamy, Lebin Cheng and Ravi Ithal, the co-holders of this patent, in particular.”
The patent affirms the intellectual property of Netskope in providing a multi-mode architecture to its customers via transparent steering of traffic associated with different cloud apps over a private or public network to a policy enforcement point in the cloud. Netskope covers all methods of directing traffic to and from cloud apps, including agent-based or agentless methods. A benefit of the traffic steering technique covered by this patent is that it is resilient to the frequent changes made to cloud app functionality and requires no administrative set up within the cloud app itself. This means that IT can easily monitor and enforce policy for not only formally sanctioned apps, but also for the much larger volume of unsanctioned (shadow IT) apps used by employees across devices, irrespective of the access point.
According to a Netskope study, the average enterprise uses 917 cloud apps. This is more than 10 times the number of apps in use than what IT estimates or has sanctioned, which underscores the need to maintain visibility and control over them.
“A foundational belief of Netskope is that IT needs real-time visibility and control over every enterprise cloud app but that they will never have administrative access over 90 percent of them,” said Krishna Narayanaswamy, co-founder and chief scientist at Netskope. “Once you accept this truth, it leads to fundamental differences in how you build a product and company. I’m particularly proud of this accomplishment and what it means for our customers.”
The need for real-time visibility and control of cloud apps extends to many use cases. With its all-mode deployment architecture, Netskope solves the broadest range of cloud security use cases in the market. This patent is applicable to the following:
- Real-time, activity-level visibility and control over sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud apps that works without administrative setup in the cloud app;
- Data loss prevention (DLP) for content moving to or from sanctioned or unsanctioned cloud apps. This can be done completely in real-time or configured to perform an initial inspection before routing content to an on-premises DLP platform;
- Policy enforcement irrespective of user access, be it on-premises or remote, on a mobile device, and on sync clients or native mobile apps that do not use a browser to communicate.
Resources
- Download the February 2016 Netskope Cloud Report for the latest on enterprise cloud app usage trends
- Learn more about how to gain visibility into enterprise cloud apps and how to ensure they are secure and compliant
- Visit the Netskope Hub for the latest commentary and insight on trends from the Netskope team
Comments about the news
“As a long-time customer of Netskope I’m pleased to see the company’s continued innovation to stay in lock-step with the pace and breadth of organic discovery that our workforce explores in the SaaS universe. The faster we can assess risk and fine-tune our controls, the better,” said Sujeet Bambawale on NetApp’s Enterprise Architecture team. “The awarding of this patent to Netskope speaks volumes about the technical horsepower they’ve assembled; as well as their leadership in this space.”
“Now more than ever, organizations require comprehensive security controls for the myriad of cloud security use cases employed in their environment, whether it be an employee accessing data on premises, remotely, over a cellular network, or via a sync client or native app,” said Doug Cahill, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “This patent reflects the scope of Netskope’s intellectual property, which provides customers deep visibility and control over sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud apps with a flexible, multi-mode architecture to safely enable and control the use of the cloud by their workforce.”
About Netskope
Netskope™, the leading cloud access security broker (CASB), helps enterprises find, understand and secure sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud apps. Through contextual awareness and a multi-mode architecture, Netskope sees the cloud differently. This results in the deepest visibility and control, the most advanced threat protection and data loss prevention and an unmatched breadth of security policies and workflows. The world’s largest companies choose Netskope, the only CASB that ensures compliant use of cloud apps in real-time, whether accessed on the corporate network, remotely or from a mobile device. With Netskope, enterprises move fast, with confidence. To learn more, visit our website.