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Elaine Feeney is a member of the Netskope Network Visionaries advisory group.
For any business, speed matters a lot. Speed of service is key to happy customers because any delays that users experience directly impact the success of the organization. Security processing that causes delays for the customers or employees has negative business impacts. Now more than ever, security controls have become a board-level priority due to elevating risks. Implementing security without impacting the speed of operations is a challenge every business struggles with today.
I have felt the pain of those trade-offs firsthand. I spent more than two decades working at MCI, Sun Microsystems, and Amazon. Most recently, I was the Vice President of Global Infrastructure Expansion at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where my team was responsible for determining where and how we expanded the network, data centers, and edge site infrastructure. While data centers are key to cloud infrastructure, edge sites have proven to be more essential as they provide critical location-specific access and security for the cloud.
NewEdge: Defining security at the speed of business
Netskope’s mission is to deliver cloud security that eliminates performance trade-offs. This is why they’ve invested well over $100M to design and scale out the Netskope Security Cloud infrastructure—known as NewEdge. NewEdge is architected to strategically position compute for security traffic processing at the edge, as close to the users as possible, which is a key requirement of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework and for delivering Security Service Edge (SSE) capabilities.
Business productivity is directly dependent on how quickly users can connect, so their traffic can get processed and go where it needs to go. Since most businesses have multiple locations, and the speed of operations matters for every user (regardless of whether they’re in the office or working remotely), the location and design of these edge sites really matter. With data centers in 57 regions today, NewEdge has more locations with compute than its competitors in cloud security.
And each of these locations makes all security services available to every customer—including firewall, web security, cloud access security broker (CASB), and zero-trust network access (ZTNA). Businesses increasingly rely on a wide variety of apps hosted in multiple clouds and therefore they need a complete security stack at the edge.
NewEdge prides itself on having the fastest, low-latency on-ramps for users accessing from anywhere, from any device—striving for consistent single-digit millisecond latency. Backed by industry-leading SLAs, NewEdge enables highly efficient, single-pass processing of traffic inside data centers to ensure the fastest access and a superior user experience while delivering on the security mission. Netskope also over-provisions the network to provide a buffer to scale before it’s needed. NewEdge also operates in a non-blocking mode so that even with all services available, the application of our security features does not throttle customer traffic to and from their SaaS applications.
More than half of NewEdge traffic runs over private or semi-private peering links. Peering (also known as network adjacency) is a direct connection with other service providers. In the case of NewEdge, it’s peering with the carriers, cloud and SaaS providers. This essentially delivers an overlay to the public internet—overcoming inher