The Rise of the Definitive Security Cloud

Almost six years ago, Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO of Netskope, laid out an incredible vision that mapped out how enterprise security will evolve to service the modern corporation. He and his co-founders, Lebin Cheng, Ravi Ithal and Krishna Narayanaswamy, had made a key observation — as employees became more mobile and as enterprises adopted the cloud, the traditional security architecture designed around hardware appliances would not keep up with emerging threats. Rather than selling boxes, Sanjay saw that security needed to be as agile and scalable as the challenges it needed to address. His ambition was to build The Definitive Security Cloud for the Enterprise.

Six years later, Netskope has changed the security landscape. Hundreds of organizations (including 25% of the Fortune 100) trust the Netskope Security Cloud to deliver 360 degree data and threat protection that works anywhere. The Netskope Security Cloud is a comprehensive platform that delivers real-time granular protection for data, people, and devices across all types of clouds (SaaS, IaaS, web). This cloud was built from the ground up with a view towards delivering best-of-class functionality in an integrated and seamless service.

Today is an exciting day for Netskope as they further expand their platform’s offerings by acquiring Sift Security, a pioneer in next-generation cloud infrastructure security and a deep expert in machine learning as applied to security. The acquisition will bring Cloud Hunter, Sift’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) threat detection, visualization, and response engine into the Netskope Security Cloud. Sift Security CEO Neil King will join Netskope to lead product strategy and management for Netskope for IaaS which secures Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other services found in use in today’s enterprises.

Cloud Hunter will fit seamlessly into the Netskope Security Cloud. And from Netskope customers’ perspective, Netskope will quickly integrate Sift’s capabilities into the Netskope “One Cloud” architecture — an untouchable point of differentiation.

As an early investor, we couldn’t be more delighted to see Netskope make this move. Netskope already provides full control of SaaS, IaaS, and web, from one cloud — a unique offering in the market. And while Netskope for IaaS was already a core part of their platform, Netskope saw an opportunity to double-down on certain critical capabilities (especially around best-of-class machine-learning and behavior analytics at the infrastructure level) that will further differentiate them in the market. For Netskope customers this is yet another example of the power of the first true security cloud. We are thrilled to welcome Neil and the Sift team to the Netskope family and we are confident that this incredibly talented group will gel culturally with the Netskope team and hit the ground running.

Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He focuses on investments in enterprise IT and infrastructure and sits on the boards of a number of rapidly scaling companies, including Netskope, Qubole, Mist, Split, TripActions, and OverOps. In his free time, Arif plays ice hockey with his wife, who yells at him for never passing the puck to her.

Lightspeed is an early stage VC firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise and consumer sectors. Lightspeed has backed 300+ companies globally in the past two decades including Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Snap and Nest.

Netskope is the leader in cloud security. We help the world’s largest organizations take full advantage of the cloud and web without sacrificing security. Our patented Cloud XD technology eliminates blind spots by going deeper than any other security provider to quickly target and control activities across thousands of cloud services and millions of websites. With full control architected in one cloud, our customers benefit from 360-degree data protection that guards data everywhere and advanced threat protection that stops elusive attacks. At Netskope, we call this smart cloud security.