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No matter what industry you’re in, solving for performance issues is always at the top of every networker’s mind.
Especially with applications like Microsoft Teams, or similar unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions from Zoom, Webex, RingCentral, Mitel, Vonage, or 8×8, that have become critical to day-to-day business operations. For a network operator responsible for a typical enterprise branch site, ensuring the network is highly-available and the performance for these apps measures up can often be the bane of their existence. It is commonplace when speaking with IT or network practitioners about their day-to-day challenges that user complaints for voice and video apps come up frequently.
Historically enterprises have attempted to address these problems by throwing more bandwidth at it. This approach has faced limited success considering the ever-growing volume of inbound Internet traffic (particularly streaming apps, like YouTube or Hulu) essentially competing with this higher-priority UCaaS traffic. Another approach has been to implement traffic prioritization and shaping techniques, which can often reduce the pain (largely based on where the throttling is implemented) but still not guarantee the desired performance in all scenarios. For example, applying quality-of-service (QoS) controls outbound is ineffective for modern streaming apps where the majority of traffic is inbound towards the branch and these apps can end up consuming a significant portion of the WAN link. Ultimately the root of the problem is often not insufficient bandwidth, but also issues like packet loss, jitter, and latency which can severely impact the app’s performance and ultimately the end user’s experience.
This is where Netskope can help solve these issues.
Modernizing branch connectivity with end-to-end SaaS and UCaaS optimization
Today Netskope is recognized as a cloud network security leader helping enterprises protect their most valuable digital assets, enforce compliance policies, and guard against threats. This is validated by the fact that Netskope was ranked as a Leader in both Gartner Magic Quadrants for Security Service Edge (SSE) and Single-Vendor Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) in 2024.
Netskope prides itself on being able to intercept and provide comprehensive inspection for all their network traffic to protect customers from security blindspots. While this is extremely appealing to CISOs and security practitioners, the other part of the Netskope story—one that resonates strongly with network, infrastructure and operations (NI&O) leaders—is what Netskope brings to bear on the performance and network optimization side for these apps. At the heart of this transformation lies the powerful combination of Netskope One Cloud Gateways seamlessly integrated within the Netskope NewEdge Network—the world’s largest and most connected private SASE cloud—delivering unmatched performance, resilience, as well as complete SSE and SD-WAN functionality and a pathway to full SASE adoption.
First-generation SD-WAN technologies are built for on-prem applications and typically fail to extend the benefits of SD-WAN to the cloud/SaaS applications. By adopting Netskope One Cloud Gateways inside the NewEdge Network—combined with diverse connectivity options (e.g. MPLS, DIA, 5G)—customers are able to embrace a cloud-fi