Just over three years ago, Joe DePalo joined Netskope as Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering. He had most recently led the infrastructure design and build-out at AWS, the world’s largest public cloud, and prior to that, engineering and operations for one of the largest content delivery networks (CDNs) at Limelight Networks. By then CDNs had become a key underpinning of the Internet and to this day remain integral to delivering much of the media, software, and streaming video content that most people take for granted. What interested Joe and his team the most about Netskope was the opportunity to apply their learnings from AWS, Limelight, among other cloud and hyperscale companies, to the unique challenges of better securing Internet and cloud traffic.
Netskope was already on the right track with the investments it had made, for example with its CloudXD™ technology that provided rich context around applications, their operations, different personal versus business instances, user context, device posture, and more. But back in 2018, the number one complaint from Netskope customers was service availability and performance. While Netskope had pioneered real-time, in-line cloud access security broker (CASB) services, its global footprint was just about a half a dozen points of presence, roughly half in the public cloud and half physical servers in co-location facilities. Today, CASB, secure web gateway (SWG), plus Cloud Firewall, and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) are the cornerstone of what analysts call Security Service Edge (SSE), and performance and availability are key requirements.
Thankfully, before SSE had even been coined as an industry acronym, the Platform Engineering team at Netskope realized that to truly deliver cloud security, at scale, with the depth and breadth of capabilities required for the future, the old approach of racking and stacking a mix of servers and vendor boxes and relying on th