As the COVID-19 virus continues to develop, we feel it’s important that we share how Netskope is approaching this epidemic as it relates to our employees, our customers, and the security and uptime of our products. Before we discuss these things, let’s first say that we share concerns, along with the rest of the world, for those affected by COVID-19 — this is certainly a difficult time for many people.
Health and Safety of Netskope Employees
We are committed to the health and safety of all Netskope employees and this will always be one of our highest priorities. Netskopers around the world were informed last week that they can work from home if they should choose and in areas where breakouts have occurred, we encouraged all Netskopers to work from home. At the same time, we suspended all international travel, limited non-essential travel domestic travel, and informed employees that they should avoid attending large events. For customers with whom we have organized executive briefings, we have asked that we make these virtual and we’ve also moved all interviews, training, and onboarding to Zoom or a comparable online conferencing service preferred by customers as well.
Employee engagement and business continuity
We’re proud of the attitude and resilience of the Netskope team during this situation. While Netskope is a cloud-first company that embraces remote work, we also have a culture that loves face-to-face interaction whether it be at our HQ in Santa Clara or one of our offices around the world. During this time we are reinforcing the importance of tools that we already use to collaborate, like Asana, GSuite, Slack, and Zoom. We’ve actively encouraged Netskopers to “check in” with their colleagues and one team has even moved a monthly happy hour to Zoom this week (playfully titled a “Zappy Hour”). These are all ways to replicate a collaborative workplace and ensure that we also maintain a strong bond and look out for each other. In Slack, we’ve started a #remote-working channel where Netskopers can share time-tested techniques to make working from home as successful as possible. These “little things” have quickly helped the team rally and align with the guidance we’ve provided around working remotely regardless of where an employee is located.
From a business continuity point of view, we are headquartered in Silicon Valley and already have plans in place to address the risks associated with potential interruptions to our business from events like wildfires, power outages, earthquakes, or a public health crisis. This plan for maintaining business continuity provides the necessary policies that we’re using today to ensure that Netskope continues to operate at the high standard we’ve set for the company. Customers can find more information about this through our support portal.
Resilience and reliability of the Netskope Security Cloud and NewEdge infrastructure
Netskope handles tens of billions of cloud, data, and network security transactions per day for millions of users across more than 1,000 customers around the world. To maintain uptime and performance, we leverage Netskope NewEdge, one of the largest secure networks in the world that is deployed in carrier grade infrastructure in more than 50 points of presence (POPs) around the world. By design, each POP is available to every customer and fully redundant with every other POP and we have capacity that scales beyond 100Tb/s. This means that in the event of any interruption, every POP is designed “fail over” to the nearest POP geographically, causing no disruption in the delivery of the security services from the Netskope Security Cloud. In addition to these infrastructure precautionary measures, our teams are also geographically dispersed, allowing us to maintain support and ensure continuity.
How Netskope is helping customers address this crisis
Netskope was born in the era of cloud and hyper-enablement when it comes to working remotely. The new SASE framework that Gartner has created, and Netskope fully ascribes to, clearly points to the need for security that addresses a world where the majority of workers are remote and all data and systems reside outside of a data center. And yet COVID-19 has brought about some new thinking for many customers who have considered remote working to be a smaller portion of the workforce. Over the last couple of weeks our customers are contending with the question of how to secure a workforce that is 100% remote and so we’ve shared a number of best practices that we are talking about with our customers and seeing play out very quickly.
- Augment legacy VPN that isn’t scaling to address 100% remote: We’re quickly spinning up zero-trust network access via Netskope Private Access (NPA) for customers who are already directing or encouraging a 50/50 rotation or 100% remote workforce and we have more than enough capacity for customers that are in this situation.
- Assess your cloud application footprint for visibility: Remote workers during this crisis may freely adopt new cloud services for communications and data sharing opening new risks. Assess cloud usage as your organization reacts to the situation and understand where new risks are developing to recommend safer alternatives.
- Secure tools that are especially important for effective remote work: Unfortunately, in every crisis there are bad actors who see a way to exploit it. To protect data and defend against web and cloud enabled threats, enterprises need to address the architectural reliance they have on the internet for remote workers to get their jobs done. They need a consolidated control point for web and cloud applications, along with other services. The Netskope CSO team is more than willing to discuss these new architectures and ways in which you can head off attacks and avoid disruption for these services.
- Ensure good remote worker experience and performance: Users requiring access from remote locations often suffer high latency and a poor user experience. Productivity diminishes as end users wait or are required to unnecessarily repeat application tasks. Selecting network infrastructure that overcomes the limitations of the public internet and delivers application and security services as close to the user as possible can significantly improve the experience of end users that are working remotely across global locations.
- Best-practices videos: Netskope offers dozens of videos showing how our customers can secure sensitive data, address remote working, and detecting threats that are specific to cloud services. These can all be found on our website here.
It’s worth saying it again: We share concerns, along with the rest of the world, for those affected by COVID-19 — this is certainly a difficult time for many people. We at Netskope are here to support you and please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.
The Netskope Team
March 18 Update:
All Netskope employees continue to work from home and all non-essential company travel has been suspended.
As of March 17, seven counties in the San Francisco Bay Area issued an order that residents need to shelter in place. The Netskope Security Cloud points of presence (POPs) located in these regions remain fully operational and the Netskope Platform Engineering team is enabled to manage these remotely from any location around the world. The physical hosting facilities are considered “essential infrastructure” by government authorities, remain operational, and have already taken steps to protect the welfare of their personnel and hosting operations.
March 25 Update:
Netskope continues to monitor the situation and there are no changes to the previously stated status of our personnel and services. We are pleased to see similar responses from our partners and in the spirit of information sharing, here are some helpful resources.
- Box COVID-19 Response
- Crowdstrike COVID-19 Resource Center
- Zoom Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Okta for Emergency Remote Work
