Netskope extends SASE localization capabilities

Netskope announced the availability of extended localization capabilities in its NewEdge secure access service edge (SASE) platform that are aimed at improving security and ensuring better experiences for global users.

With the rollout of Localization Zones to its NewEdge security private cloud, Netskope is offering a localized experience for 220 countries and territories. While using a cloud web proxy or a security service edge (SSE) solution can offer enterprise companies advantages such as reduced management overhead and enhanced security coverage, it can also pose challenges when trying to deliver a localized user experience.

For instance, end users tapping into a public cloud or using a centralized cloud service in a location without a data center, application or service would have to backhaul to a location that has one. If the user is in Egypt and the service has to use a data center in Italy, the content could be delivered in Italian. Behind the scenes, the mismatched IP addresses from the actual location to the location of the data center serving the content could raise security red flags.

“It makes for a very confusing experience. If you are on a public cloud, relying on a transit provider, there is no way to make sure that the internet doesn’t associate your IP address with the country of the data center and not where you actually are,” explains Joe DePalo, chief platform officer at Netskope.

IP addresses being misrepresented due to lack of localization also causes significant security concerns. For instance, if that same end user in Egypt logs in to a local service, the service would be expecting an Egyptian IP address. When instead it receives an Italian IP address, it could cause a security alert and result in a poor experience for the end user. According to DePalo, some Netskope competitors would turn off the security settings to enable a better localized user experience, but then that would expose the enterprise user and infrastructure to risks.   

“We can touch just about every IP address in the world in 30 milliseconds or less, and that allows for the negation of the security latency tax, and that allows for us to have control over that experience for our users,” DePalo says. “We focused on building a global infrastructure with more than 70 cities and more than 100 data centers, in which we are focused on that connectivity to make sure the user can get to us very quickly, that there’s compute in every location, that we can get to the cloud location very quickly.”

According to Netskope, Localization Zones “deliver the same digital experience for customers as going direct-to-net, regardless of where they are accessing from.” NewEdge customers can benefit from native language and localized content support for websites and access to geo-fenced content and applications, even if there is no in-country data center. Netskope customers say localized content options improve performance for their end users.

“Data residency is one thing, and user experience is another. We use more than 80 of Netskope’s NewEdge global data centers to meet our data processing compliance requirements, but for a truly global business like ours, compliance alone is not enough,” said David Mann, managing director of information security & infrastructure services at PageGroup, in a statement. “Netskope’s NewEdge Localization Zones mean that our data routing decisions don’t determine things like the language that our employees search results are returned in—or the geographical IP-restricted web services that they are able to access. This gives Netskope much more freedom to make performance-based routing decisions to maximize user experience and enhance resilience.”

Netskope also continues to improve upon its NewEdge platform by growing its global footprint of regions supported by full data centers, each offering a complete SSE stack including cloud firewall, secure web gateway (SWG), inline cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network access (ZTNA), and data and threat protection. Netskope also made enhancements to the connectedness of its infrastructure with more than 3,000 adjacencies to more than 620 unique autonomous systems numbers (ASN), which reduces latency on the first and last mile and improves user and application experiences.