Here at Netskope we are celebrating our 10th anniversary this month, but while our story over that decade is very cool, any blog about it will be of limited interest outside of our own employee base. I wanted to add a different lens to our internal observations and so I started to refresh my memory with research into exactly what went on over those years while we were beavering away to build the best SASE platform in the world.
Let me start by setting the scene; recapping the tech headlines in the two years prior to Netskope’s launch provides a really clear picture of what was driving the vision of our founders. In 2010 Apple launched the iPad, IBM Watson hit the headlines, Instagram hit our phones, and Microsoft Azure spoilt AWS’s IaaS party-for-one. In 2011, Adobe’s Creative Cloud was the latest example of an established software giant enticed to provide Everything-as-a-Service, Uber started out on its own decade of disruption, Minecraft stole our children, and we all started using either iMessage or Snapchat, depending on our demographic.
And then in 2012 Netskope was born.
In the same year 6.5 ZB of data was created, which seemed huge at the time but is tiny compared to the 64.2 ZB of data that was created in 2020 (I didn’t easily find the 2021 numbers… perhaps they are still counting?) By October 2012, Facebook reached 1 billion users and even the most skeptical marketeers could no l