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When it comes to data security, you want it to be accurate, reliable, thorough, and fast. Ideally, faster today than it was yesterday, and faster tomorrow than it was today, to address increasing data security needs in the same amount of time or less. We’re seeing a growing prevalence of employees using unmanaged devices, handling sensitive organizational structured and unstructured data, and accessing managed and unmanaged apps with those devices and that data. And many are doing all of it in a way that is unstoppable or uncontrollable for corporate information security teams, exposing sensitive organizational data to threats, potentially leading to significant sensitive data loss.
With all of that in mind, what should organizations do to prevent these outcomes?
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key capabilities that underpin a consolidated, unified data security approach and how they can accelerate data security intelligence and capabilities over time and solve some of the key pain points for organizations. By the end of this article, you will understand why Netskope is the right choice to protect your sensitive data.
Automate discovery and protection of your data wherever it lives and moves
Organizations today confront a significant challenge: sensitive data constantly moves beyond traditional network boundaries due to hybrid work models, cloud service adoption, and an explosion in data volume, variety, and velocity. A combination of modern, cloud-delivered data security posture management (DSPM) and data loss prevention (DLP) technology can help proactively address this by offering a comprehensive solution that discovers, monitors, and protects sensitive data across every critical channel. This means covering data in motion, at rest, and in use across AI applications, SaaS applications, IaaS environments, corporate networks, branch offices, mobile workforces, email services, and employee endpoints.
Unlike legacy DLP solutions, which were commonly built to deal with on-premises environments, but struggle with cloud environments and distributed data, a combined solution should apply your data security policies (not those of the solution vendor) to every cloud and on-premises location where your data is stored, used, or transferred, all managed from a centralized cloud service. This unified approach minimizes security blind spots and dramatically reduces complexity and costs, allowing organizations to maintain control over their data no matter where it lives or moves.
Automate data classification and tagging
Effective data security hinges on accurate and reliable identification of sensitive information, a task complicated by the sheer volume and diversity of modern data. Information security leaders and administrators alike generally need data discovery and monitoring solutions that have a broad set of data detection capabilities with advanced classification algorithms that minimize false positive security alerts and reduce triage fatigue. To accommodate constantly growing governance requirements worldwide, they also need solutions that discover and properly protect data in various categories like financial, medical, and other personal identifiable information (PII) and allow for granular customization with proximity keywords.
Additionally, these solutions should provide:
- Exact data matching (EDM) that fingerprints specific datasets like client lists or contracts, providing a nearly infallible method for detecting sensitive information sourced from structured data.
- Optical character recognition (OCR) that not only extracts textual information from images and PDFs, but also performs AI and ML-based image classification that uniquely recognizes sensitive file types even when corrupted or blurry.
- Continuous scanning of structured and unstructured data across all on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments to provide complete visibility and automated classification to support regulatory compliance (more on this further down).
Automate SaaS application access control
SaaS applications serve as crucial business enablers, connecting employees globally and making data readily available and producible. This convenience introduces risks, however, including exposure to new cloud threats, excessive sharing permissions, and data transmission through unsanctioned or personal application instances. So, safely enabling organizational cloud application adoption without tradeoffs to network performance or user productivity is critical to any modern data security solution.
From a security perspective, it needs to:
- Block unintentional or unapproved movement of sensitive data between cloud application instances within the context of application and user risk.
- Give visibility across what can often be tens of thousands of SaaS applications and IaaS services, leveraging numerous risk categories to ensure granular security policies.
- Prevent risky uploads and downloads, data oversharing, and the exposure of sensitive data to external users or unauthorized application instances.
- Extend data security policies to SaaS applications both inline and via APIs to discover and protect sensitive data in motion and at rest, whether it’s across managed applications, unmanaged applications, or employees’ personal application instances.
Automate secure generative AI usage
The increasing adoption of generative AI and the emergence of new AI-driven attacks drive the need for an adaptive and intelligent approach to data security. A critical part of this approach is finding a reliable, modern solution that leverages LLM-based rapid risk categorization to help automatically stay ahead of the sprawling SaaS and GenAI landscape. Such an approach enables the organization to gain deeper understanding and quickly target and control activities across thousands of cloud services, including SaaS, GenAI, IaaS, and millions of websites, eliminating crucial blind spots.
A reliable, modern data security platform should provide AI-powered data and threat protection that automatically adapts to the ever-growing data landscape, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure, even as new AI technologies are integrated into business operations. It should also provide granular visibility and control over cloud application usage to empower security teams to define targeted policies based on user, application, instance, risk, activity, data, and device type, thus allowing safe and secure adoption of generative AI tools within the enterprise.
Automate data privacy and compliance controls
Back to the compliance topic. Maintaining data privacy and adhering to stringent compliance regulations around the world, like GDPR, CCPA, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GLBA, pose significant challenges for modern enterprises.
Proactively addressing these challenges by empowering security teams to manage and protect sensitive data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments with confidence is essential toward keeping up with ever-growing global regulatory requirements. Automating compliance and policy enforcement through a no-code policy engine that streamlines data tagging, governance, and adaptive access control to align with regulatory standards is further beneficial. Seamlessly integrating with third-party security tools, ensuring consistent enforcement of data privacy and compliance policies across all services and user endpoints, enabling automated alerts, workflows, and remediation for comprehensive data security at scale adds even more efficiency and value.
Choose Netskope
WIth all this in mind, Netskope One SSE, with its integrated DSPM, DLP, and CASB, does everything I’ve discussed above. But, let’s take a closer look at some of those key functionalities:
- Netskope One DSPM automates the discovery, assessment, and classification of your sensitive structured and unstructured data to proactively deliver intelligent visibility, posture assessment, and risk evaluation for your data on premises and across your IaaS, PaaS, and managed SaaS applications. It leverages smart scanning to provide a high-level, risk-centric view of your data—enabling faster policy optimization and streamlined security workflows.
- Netskope One DLP discovers, monitors, and protects sensitive data in-motion across SaaS applications, IaaS, corporate networks and branch offices, the mobile workforce, email services and through employees’ endpoints. Delivered from a centralized cloud service, it provides unified data security policies for every location where data is stored, used, or transferred.
- Netskope One CASB proactively secures your organization and data from all modern cloud risks. It ensures the broadest visibility and control of SaaS and IaaS services, the most advanced enterprise data protection, and real-time security response to provide comprehensive and adaptive security across all users, applications, and data.
Given all the above, the answer should be clear: Netskope is indeed the best choice to protect your sensitive data. But don’t just take my word for it. Gartner has put Netskope in its Leader category in all four of its SSE Magic Quadrants since 2022. And, not only does Netskope stand out from other SSE vendors with the best “Completeness of Vision” in the 2025 MQ in particular, but it also is the only vendor ranked among the two highest scoring vendors for all six category Use Cases in the 2025 Gartner Critical Capabilities Report for SSE.
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