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“If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.”
This quote from Dwight Eisenhower isn’t in reference to cybersecurity, but if you are a CISO you probably know a similar quote about how modern security tools make it seem like you need to trade off usability, flexibility, and scalability for “total security.” In an industry full of narrowly focused products, vendors seem to often assume: a) high level of technical expertise from security teams, b) well-defined security processes and similarly organized teams, and c) security takes precedence over user/business needs at all enterprises.
These flawed assumptions result in convoluted products that require specialized training, are cumbersome to manage, and force enterprises to forego simplicity and scalability for protection. While many consumer and enterprise products have moved to offer an ‘Apple-like’ experience for users, security products seem to lag behind.
Today, we announced the release of new advanced analytics and visualization capabilities for the Netskope Active Platform to address these challenges and disrupt the notion that user experience needs to suffer in order to achieve security. When we set off on this journey, we could not imagine that we would touch everyone across the entire company from sales, marketing, support, customer success, product management and engineering.
Our goal was to understand a day in the life of our customers – whether they are a Chief Information Security officer or a Security Forensics analyst. We approached this with a design-driven process led by our user research and experience team. This entailed full immersion in understanding our customers’ day-to-day tasks and challenges via on-site visits, as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of Netskope customers. Our team internalized the demands faced by security teams as they work to keep up with the pace of enterprise cloud adoption, stay ahead of evolving threats, and deal with the vast amounts of data that they had to parse through to meet their business security goals.
As part of this process, and in parallel with our immersive customer work, our backend engineering team also explored how to scale our analytics stacks, as the rapid adoption of the cloud has demanded that Netskope scale from processing the multiple billions of transactions we do today toward hundreds of billions of transactions.
We zeroed in on an approach that integrates multiple big data analytics engines, one engine that is optimized for fast ingestion of data and another that is optimized for fast sorting and grouping of data. This enables us to aggregate data from multiple billions of cloud transactions across millions of on-premises and remote users, and thousands of sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud applications in use at our customers. It also lets administrators perform ad-hoc, real-time queries that group, filter, and drill-down on data across the entire enterprise’s cloud activities.
The new and intuitive user experience allows security professionals to quickly drill-down to the most relevant data or pivot across the most common views for fast investigations with a single click. Each user can build a customized view of information tailor-made to their needs and role by selecting or customizing from an extensive widget library, allowing them to focus on the areas that matter most to them.