Netskope Bursts into Cloud Game with Cloud App Analytics and Policy Platform

Netskope has entered the cloud market with a bang, coming out of stealth mode today with general availability of its cloud app analytics and policy platform. The company, which also announced it had received $21 million in funding, aims to help other companies adopt cloud apps by ensuring their safety, compliance and high performance standards.

That’s a good combination for companies interested in moving to the cloud, but perhaps unsure because of doubts about safety and reliability. And Netskope is backing up its claims since the company has spent the last year being vetted and tested by dozens of medium-to-large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies representing a variety of industries.

The Netskope solution works by discovering cloud apps and offering visibility and actionable insights on usage. It also provides deep analytics on cloud app usage like user info, details on content and specific activities and where and with whom content is shared. Users may also access the Cloud Confidence Index database, providing more than 2,600 cloud apps that have been assessed for security and readiness. The SkopeSights feature helps users decide which apps to standardize on as well as identify potentially risky behaviors and activities.

Congruent to their launch, Netskope also released their Netskope Cloud report, showing the top 10 enterprise cloud apps, the differences among categories, and some of the reasons cloud apps may fall short. Not surprisingly, CRM led the pack with Salesforce.com coming in at number one, followed by cloud storage and backup apps Box and CrashPlan. The report finds that cloud apps need the most improvement around access permissions, data classification and encryption of data at rest along with key management.

"Cloud apps are the inevitable future because they let people go fast and work flexibly,” said Sanjay Beri, CEO of Netskope. “Up until now, IT couldn't embrace cloud apps because they couldn't see what apps were running, what people were doing in them, or enforce policies. We created Netskope to eliminate the catch-22 between being agile and being secure."

The Netskope solution is available now, and pricing is on a subscription basis, per user, per year.