Netskope: Platform-based solutions are all the rage today

“Netskope has from day one stayed true to one central promise, which is that we will not go away from the promise of a single client, single console, single network,” says Kunal Jha, Regional Director for Netskope Asia.

When it comes to SASE, Netskope is a global leader in the industry, especially when it comes to helping organizations apply zero trust and AI as well as machine learning innovations. Netskope was also recently named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide DLP 2025 Vendor Assessment.

According to the report, "Netskope offers the full scope of capabilities in its DLP offering" and "It can be used for both structured and unstructured data, offers an option for images, and can be used for data at rest, data in use, and data in motion."

The successful growth of the vendor has even led to conversations of the cybersecurity vendor going public in the second half of the year. With annual recurring revenue surpassing US$500 million, a significant contribution to its growth comes from the Asia Pacific region.

To understand more about how Netskope is supporting customers at every phase of security and network modernization in the region, CRN Asia speaks to Kunal Jha, Regional Director for Netskope Asia.

Can you share with us the state of network security today?

At the core of it, SASE is probably the coming together of classic wide area networking and security functions. In the beginning, SD-WAN and the overall security stack were looked at separately and the decisions were made by different teams within organizations. Today, we are increasingly seeing an appetite for a single vendor decision.

While basic technologies like secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, zero trust network access have been around for a while, we're seeing a greater appetite in areas such as data leakage prevention (DLP) from traditional on-premise vendors who used to do DLP to a cloud-based solution, which can collapse a lot of functions provided by niche vendors today under a single platform, simplifying the stack.

We’re seeing a lot of calls for consolidation, a lot of calls for cost optimization, but more often than not, a lot of calls for overall risk reduction in the security posture that enterprises have. It depends on every organization's journey.

Are organizations moving towards platform-based solutions?

Platform-based solutions are all the rage today, with some of our contemporaries calling that out quite publicly. Netskope has from day one stayed true to one central promise, which is that we will not go away from the promise of a single client, single console, single network. Regardless of what acquisitions we make, regardless of what new functionality we release to market, we will not allow that to go out until it is part of the same console that runs our existing stack.

And this effectively sets us apart from the other definition of being platformized, which is buying everything from a single vendor. That doesn't necessarily mean you have unscrambled the egg. It's still a big scramble.

It's still a big mess, even though the logo on it might belong to the same vendor. True platform capability comes in when you do not allow certain functionality to go off on a tangent. You never go to a second console. You never go to two clients. You never go to two networks. And that has been at the center of what Netskope is trying to do.

It rings true in every new logo that we land. Existing customers, who have used our solutions started with maybe one or two modules, now use the full stack. The ease with which they've been able to consolidate other functionality and still have the same team run the entire show from the same console.

And I think that's one big part of what we set us apart in the market.

How are customers, especially when you have conversations with CISOs and such, responding to this?

It's generally received well, as long as we don't go in with any assumptions. The general assumption is that CISOs, CIOs and senior decision makers want to platformize because they want to save cost. That may be and is often one of the drivers. Nobody has too much money lying around to throw at new solutions.

But what they realize once they begin evaluating solutions, such as ours, is that the simplicity, the reduction in manpower, the reduction in overall operational complexity, that having a platform-based solution brings about is probably of greater value. So, the intangible benefits to a certain extent versus hard costs outweigh just the cost savings, although that does become a primary talking point often. So, decision makers are receiving this well, but they've often put us to the test.

Put your money where your mouth is. Don't give me a PowerPoint version of a sales pitch. And as such, you'll see the more Netskope folks going to POV. Let's put this to the test. Let the solution do the talking. And once we move to the POV stages, this is where we have the highest chances of success and the highest conversion.

Are customers also discussing GenAI capabilities with Netskope?

Yes, absolutely. I don't think any conversation is complete without talking about AI these days. While AI from a consumer point of view is relatively recent, since the chat GPT explosion, AI in terms of what's at the heart of it, which is machine learning, has been part of our offering for a very long time, as it has been for a lot of other vendors in the industry.

But with GenAI and access to large language models becoming easier, there's a lot of areas where we've begun to use AI in our product as well. One of them is the ability to categorize new websites or applications that pop up on the web.

So, let's look at GenAI as a category. It started with chat GPT. Within the Netskope console, if you go and look today, there's more than 500 of these applications in the category now, growing on a daily basis. Even when DeepSeek came about, we were ready because we're using AI to evaluate these new applications as they pop up. We test their security capability to see how safe they are. Based on that, we provide them with what we call a Cloud Confidence Index (CCI) score.

If the CCI score is 75 out of 100 or above, for example, it's safe to use. If it is 50 to 75, it is moderate risk. And if it is below 50, you should discourage your employees from using it. This classification of new apps used to be a manual process done by analysts who would actually go look for information about these websites, where they're headquartered, what certifications do they have, have they been breached recently, what data centers do they live in, etc. All of this can now be done by AI.

Another example is the concept of optical character recognition (OCR) within DLP, a capability that is used to recognize certain types of documents when they're being exchanged.

Let's say a passport is being uploaded. OCR can read the characters and find out that this is a passport. Unfortunately, if the passport image is blurred, traditional technologies like OCR will fail. AI, however, is intelligent enough to still recognize, even in a blurred state, that this looks like a passport. It has a picture, which is blurred. It has some information, which is blurred. It has a magnetic strip at the bottom, which is blurred. But it's definitely a passport. OCR will fail, but AI will still catch that and make sure it doesn't get leaked. These are areas where we're using AI significantly.

Which industries or customers that you're seeing taking a serious focus on this?

On a high level, the solution and the premise of it is really industry agnostic. If you are a company, and you have employees who use devices to access applications to do their work, you need an access security strategy, which is what SASE essentially is at the heart of it.

However, there are certain industries that are faster to look at these solutions and industries for whom this is more important than for others is. Financial services are absolutely top of the heap. We talk to them more often than anybody else.

Manufacturing is another industry. They're really looking at factory workers, third party workers, contractors who need conditional access to certain components. They may have their own endpoints, maybe a BYOD situation, devices on which the company has no control, unmanaged. How do you ensure that these unmanaged devices don't end up infecting or poisoning the network? Manufacturing is looking at it as well.

There is also the telecom industry and then certain areas of the government. We've engaged with public sector entities across the board. We've had some success, but more federal and central governments are looking at this as a broader solution to the problem that government employees may be facing as well.