The Power of Patents as Netskope “Customer Zero”

As Netskope approaches the 300 patent milestone, I sat down for a quick chat with our CISO James Robinson to hear about the most recent patent granted to his team,  find out why he sees patents as being so important, and discover what they tell us about the way his team—the team in charge of cybersecurity at a cybersecurity company—innovates.

Max: Why is the corporate security team securing patents? Isn’t that the job of the R&D and product teams?

James: It absolutely is – and they have plenty too! But here we run a program called Customer Zero, where our Global Information Security team works very closely with the Netskope R&D and product development teams. Because we are at the coalface, doing exactly the same jobs with the exact same responsibilities as our customers, we have a unique insight sitting within Netskope that it would be crazy to ignore. So we have formed working processes whereby we build as well as test and consume the Netskope technology, and in doing so help ensure our products are always pushing to address the very real challenges faced by all cybersecurity teams. 

Max: Can you tell me a bit about this most recent patent you have been granted?

James: This patent was focused on setting up a system to be able to perform “SaaS forensics” within the Netskope platform. We often think about forensics related to IaaS, infrastructure and cloud, or a traditional server or endpoint, and the process for supporting those is very well-documented, but it’s not nearly as well-defined for SaaS. What’s more, the tooling is nearly non-existent too. If you think about it, your SaaS applications are part of your attack surface, and that’s something that Netskope has always being focused on securing. We not only help give you visibility,  we want to be able to help you with that next step of taking in something that happened, understanding what it is and what you can do about it. It also can help with other elements that may not fall under the traditional methodologies around forensics, such as capturing a live image or the memory, and trying to get immutable logs. You have to stitch things together to understand what happened and constructively learn from it. A key innovation covered by the patent allows us to go back in time and look to see how the environment has changed over time. For instance, did something open up and make it vulnerable? We can go back in time and process the logs, along with the changes to the SaaS application to better understand what was happening using retrospective analysis.

Max: How did this patent come about?

James: The idea came from the Global Information Security team asking, “If we had an incident with a SaaS app, what would we do?” That then turned into me challenging our CSIRT team to make sure they were prepared accordingly. This meant doing table top exercises, which is where we found that there wasn’t really a system there to support us when it came to SaaS forensics. That’s why we ended up building this. It’s a really great example of the way that our security team performs the role of Customer Zero: identifying challenges and opportunities, and building solutions that can then be fed into our product to benefit customers. 

Max: Why is it so important that your team is securing patents?

All of the patents that the GIS team have been a part of have become part of the core Netskope product. And they’ve included things like protocol uplift and securing legacy systems, among others. As “Customer Zero” this helps Netskope to build out the sorts of functionality that real world security teams are looking for. We are confronted by real challenges and are looking for practical solutions. The outcomes and the solutions are therefore highly practical and of use to all our customers. For us, we love that role, spanning our frontline role with product development. 

If you’d like to hear about how other Netskopers use patents to protect innovation, listen to the Security Visionaries podcast episode “On Patents, Trolls, and Innovation” featuring Netskope CTO Krishna Narayanaswamy.