Netskope today launched its Next Gen SASE Branch product, which uses Borderless SD-WAN technology to overhaul enterprise branch infrastructure and management. The new solution caps off a busy year of activity for Netskope, which started 2023 by raising $401 million in funding to help advance its secure access service edge (SASE) efforts.

Netskope Next Gen SASE Branch is designed to converge networking, security and management into a unified SASE offering for branch deployments. The solution provides a context-aware SASE fabric that supports over 75,000 apps with smart quality-of-service controls. It also includes cloud-based management and consistent policy enforcement across environments.

The new platform aims to address challenges with legacy branch infrastructure that rely on outdated systems and disjointed security products

"Uncertain macroeconomic conditions force enterprises to do more with less," Parag Thakore, senior vice president at Netskope, told SDxCentral. "We are definitely seeing a big push in the SASE world, where customers don’t want multiple point products…customers are looking for a platform approach."

The Netskope Borderless SD-WAN technology came to the company via the acquisition of Infiniot in 2022.

The Borderless SD-WAN provides a reliable and easy to manage framework for connectivity across an organization's branches.

Thakore said that the Next Gen SASE Branch powered by Borderless SD-WAN incorporates a distributed network of SASE gateways within the Netskope NewEdge Cloud to provide secure, high-performance datapath from any branch, data center or remote user to any cloud, SaaS, or UCaaS application. He added that Netskope Global WAN connects trans-continental branches to headquarters across different continents to ensure reliability and a worldwide user experience.

A key challenge that Netskope is looking to solve with its new SASE solution is to help reduce security complexity at a branch level.

"Today, most branch infrastructure is complex, expensive and uses too many point products," Thakore said. "It does not detect or prioritize tens of thousands of vital cloud apps nor does it secure you from the explosion of IoT devices and the threats they create."

Thakore noted that another challenge is the cost and complexity of disjointed point products, whether on-premises intrusion prevention system (IPS), next generation firewall (NGFW), IoT security or cloud security services like cloud access security broker (CASB) and secure web gateway (SWG). In his view the disjointed products are driving up costs and complexity because they’re not well integrated and as a result are creating inconsistent, ineffective security policies between branches and remote users.

The Next Gen SASE Branch aims to reduce complexity by providing a unified set of capabilities to protect branch users. The integration of context aware application security is one such capability. Thakore said that the context awareness benefits from an integration with Netskope's Zero Trust Engine to support over 75,000 SaaS applications for visibility and control. Going a step further the technology also promotes efficient operations with automatic SD-WAN traffic engineering by prioritizing with Netskope Cloud Confidence Index-based smart defaults.

In 2023, every vendor has to have an artificial intelligence (AI) component and Netskope isn't an exception.

The Next Gen SASE Branch is able to autonomously categorize both managed and unmanaged IP-connected devices within the network. Thakore said that Netskope also uses AI/ML to detect breaches and dynamically micro-segment those devices to isolate and prevent lateral movement of threats."There is a trend toward more autonomous and self-driving networks in which AI/ML technologies can be leveraged to make networking decisions without or with limited human intervention," he said. "As hype around generative AI peaks, we continue to invest in AI-powered capabilities to improve operational efficiency. "