Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) – a new model for cyber security and networking – has opened a new office in Bangalore to accommodate a local team that has more than doubled in size since January 2021, becoming one of the company’s largest teams in the world with a highly strategic role within the global business. The strong local team is focused on engineering innovation, and local specialists are named among inventors on a number of Netskope’s technology patents in areas including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
The new Bangalore office is also host to Netskope’s local go-to-market team, which has seen significant success during the five years it has pursued local sales. A quarter of the largest 50 companies in India’s ET500 is using Netskope for cloud security and data protection, including three of India’s four largest manufacturers, and five of the ten largest e-commerce players in the region. In the last financial year, the company has recorded solid growth from new and existing customers, driven by a go-to-market strategy focused on a network of tech partners and resellers with footprints in networking and security transformation projects.
Alok Kothari, Managing Director of Netskope India commented; “Since day one, India has sat at the very core of Netskope’s DNA, and it is great to witness how innovation that originates from this country can go on to change the way organisations around the world secure data. We hold more than 100 issued U.S. patents, and a third of those awarded in 2022 include named involvement of our Indian engineers. Some of the most recent patents awarded relate to Netskope’s AI advances, demonstrating that India’s engineers are operating at the forefront of global innovation and working on the most important technology trends.”
In recent years, hybrid and remote working models have extended organisations’ traditional security perimeters, and connectivity advances in India, such as the recent roll out of 5G, have enabled an acceleration in cloud adoption and use among those aiming to achieve their digital transformation. As cloud adoption accelerates, creating an increasingly complex security landscape, businesses and governments are being forced to rethink their security strategies, and many are adopting a SASE approach to protect data everywhere it goes—without network performance trade-offs. The sophistication of the threat landscape, with attackers smartly leveraging cloud environments to target valuable data, coupled with the upcoming Digital Personal Data Protection Bill to be introduced next month, are also putting cloud security and data protection on top of companies’ agenda.
Netskope offers SASE as a single, converged platform or as part of well-integrated multi-vendor deployments. Netskope SASE uses one policy framework and one console to simplify technology operations, preserve network performance, and provide more visibility to security and networking teams. The Netskope SASE platform combines industry-leading Security Service Edge (SSE) and SD-WAN—both of which are crucial to providing optimised access and zero trust security for SASE architecture.
Kothari concludes; “Despite the fact our Indian sales operations only started five years ago, we have become quickly embedded in the technology estate of both private and public organisations in the region, helping them to navigate emerging business trends such as hybrid work, and enabling them to stay ahead of security concerns exacerbated by broader geopolitical and cyberwarfare dynamics. Data protection is top of mind for Indian organisations and we are proud to be a central part of those discussions in India’s largest organisations.”
