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“Transforming enterprise security is no longer a nice-to-have, but a requirement in order to protect and secure a company’s most important assets,” said Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. It has now raised a total of $400 milllion over six funding rounds. Other previous investors Accel, Geodesic Capital, Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Social Capital participated in the latest fundraising, as well as new investor, Base Partners.

CLOUD NETSKOPE ICONIQ GROWTH SERIES

The Series F funding round was led by existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, which also led the company’s previous $100 million round last year. With this new round of funding, we are one step closer to helping all organizations match their security strategy with the pace of today’s cloud-first world.” “We have spent the last six years bringing the leading security cloud to enterprises to address this growing challenge as more and more companies embrace digital transformation. “Simply put, without security transformation, digital transformation will fail,” said Beri. The company has grown to employ about 610 staff, necessitating a recent move from Los Altos in California to bigger headquarters in Santa Clara. Netskope says its latest investment will allow it to pursue further research and development, improve its enterprise security cloud platform and expand its global data center network. Gartner singled out Netskope’s access controls and comprehensive risk database for praise, but said that over the past 12 months there had been a minor increase “in the number of complaints related to installation challenges, technical support quality and service performance”. Other players include Palo Alto Networks, Cisco and Forcepoint. Its latest ‘ Magic Quadrant’ report into CASBs, focusing on research in specific markets to show the relative positions of competitors, finds Netskope among the four market leaders alongside McAfee, Symantec and Bitglass. Growing Market in Security Transformation as Tech Proves Essential It estimates that 60% of large enterprises will be using a CASB by 2022 to manage at least some cloud services, compared with less than 20% currently.

Security and risk management leaders concerned about their organization’s cloud use should investigate cloud access security brokers (CASBs), Gartner advises. Microsoft made in-roads into the segment when it bought Adallom in 2015.ĭespite the stream of cybersecurity deals, Sanjay Beri, Netskope’s founder and chief executive, has said that the company will remain independent, and the plan is eventually to direct it towards an initial public offering.Īccording to IT consulting firm Gartner, cloud access security brokers like these have become an essential element of any cloud security strategy, helping organizations govern the use of cloud and protect sensitive data in the cloud. Other cybersecurity challengers in the space include Blue Coat, which was bought in 2016 by Symantec, maker of the Norton anti-virus software, and another anti-virus pioneer, McAfee, which bought Skyhigh Networks last year. Once in use by an IT department, Netskope oversees all network activity, including web pages and apps used, and helps to identify bad practices. Layered on top is a plethora of apps that they might have downloaded themselves, alongside those issued by the company. “As a result, enterprises are in need of a new approach as legacy security solutions were designed for a world where data and applications were placed in centralized data centers and IT teams were responsible for application selection and deployment.” Growth in Bad Practice SurveillanceĮmployees often use a range of different equipment at work, from company-issued devices to hardware of their own. “This has significantly increased the attack surface of all enterprises, leaving security teams without the means to protect these new threat vectors,” said Netskope in a statement.

The digital-first passage has shifted administrative control away from information technology departments, leaving them potentially open to attack. The six-year-old company provides a platform to assist companies in managing risks posed by employees using a variety of devices and apps in the workplace.Īccording to Netskope, as the majority of enterprises adopt a digital-first mindset, businesses have turned to the many web-based services on offer, like Google’s G-suite, Dropbox, Slack and Amazon Web Services. The latest funding round values it at more than $1 billion, pushing it into the unicorn club stable.

Cybersecurity company Netskope, a provider of cloud-based defenses for businesses, has raised $168.7 million in a new round of venture capital funding.

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