Netskope Raises $75M to Address Cloud Security

Fresh off raising an additional $75 million in funding from venture capitalists, Netskope, a provider of cloud accessing security broker software and services, plans to become a top-tier provide of cloud security technologies that are sold primary via the channel.

Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri said that after raising a total of $130 million, the end goal for Netskope is to become nothing less than the next “large-scale iconic security company.”

Managing cloud access, noted Beri, is expected to become a $100 billion market. In the last year, Netskope claims to have increased its customer base by 500 percent, resulting in a 600 percent increase in revenue. The company also claims that its customers rank among the world’s top ten healthcare, insurance, banking, retail, and manufacturing brands, as well as a range of high-tech, energy and utility companies. As a result, Netskope now employees 250 people worldwide.

At the core of that activity is cloud access management software, called the Netskope Active Platform, which serves as a broker in terms of limiting which employees get access to any specific cloud application. At a time when internal IT organizations are looking to roll back the tide of “Shadow IT” that has engulfed their organizations, Beri noted IT organizations are investing heavily in multiple forms of cloud governance technologies.

Beyond merely granting or blocking access to cloud applications, Beri said makes use of the application programming interfaces (APIs) those applications reduce risks, prevent data loss, and govern usage of those applications in real time. For example, Netskope can alert IT to security issues triggered either by a violation of a policy or detected as an anomaly in real-time. The Netskope Active Platform also makes use of these APIs to automate IT’s response to those issues by automatically invoking policies based on the activity, content, device, location, and Active Directory group or specific end user involved. For example, the internal IT organization can implement a policy that prevent a specific class for end users from sharing certain types of data outside the company.

Beri said that Netskope currently fulfills 80 percent of its sales via about 100 channel partners. Most of those deployments involve a version of the company’s software that is deployed in the cloud, but Beri said that Netskope also has customers that deployed its software both on premise and in a hybrid cloud mode.

With just about every organization of any size now relying on cloud applications it’s clear that IT departments that are held accountable for not only who gets to access those applications, but also from where and when. As a result, there’s a whole new realm of opportunity opening up for solution providers that have a modicum of cloud access expertise at a time when most internal IT organizations are totally blind in terms of what cloud applications are actually being used inside their own organizations.