Updates: Netskope - Can The NewEdge Shake Up SASE & The Broader Enterprise Networking Landscape (Pt.2)

Summary

• In Part 1, we discussed Netskope's data-centric approach to SASE. In Part 2 we delve into the company's other focus to SASE - enterprise networking.
• We explain why Netskope's NewEdge, its global network, has advantages versus Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, and Cloudflare.
• Lastly, we discuss the future of NewEdge where Netskope aims for it to be the networking backbone for its enterprise customers, not just a SASE component.

The Importance of NewEdge

For Beri to realize his vision of a data-centric approach to cybersecurity, he knew he would need to build a highly performant global network. If you want to analyze data to such an extent, then this is going to add latency at the processing nodes, or the SASE PoPs. Hence, Beri wanted to offset the added latency at the processing nodes via super-fast transit of traffic.

To begin doing this, in 2018 Beri hired Joe De Palo, the then Global Head of Internet Services at AWS, and before that an SVP of Engineering at CDN provider Limelight Networks, and one of probably only a couple hundred people in the world who could build out a performant global network, quickly and from scratch.

De Palo helped recruit some of the best network engineers in the world to Netskope, and in a timeframe of about 18 months, his team had built a very fast network, named the NewEdge, to serve Netskope’s traffic – just in time for when SASE became a hot topic in 2020.

Netskope vs. PANW

Netskope's approach to building their network from scratch in just 18 months is particularly impressive when compared to industry peers. In the grand scheme of things, this timeframe is not much longer than the approximately six months it took PANW to create a workable global SASE solution using Google's existing network infrastructure. PANW's CEO, Nikesh Arora, made the strategic decision to leverage Google's network to rapidly enter the SASE market, driven by the Gartner-inspired industry buzz in 2019. This move was crucial to prevent ZS from dominating the market entirely. However, if given the choice, most vendors entering the SASE market would likely prefer Netskope's approach: taking 18 months to build a global, homegrown, private network, tailored for enterprise networking and optimized for maximum performance, rather than settling for a solution dependent on a CSP’s (Cloud Service Provider) infrastructure, even if it could be implemented more quickly.