Netskope has announced its continued global expansion of the Netskope NewEdge network with an additional data center now launched and taking traffic in South Africa.
The new Cape Town deployment complements the existing Johannesburg infrastructure to meet growing customer demand and provide more capacity and redundancy in the region. NewEdge is now powered by data centers in 57 regions, each of which provides full compute for security traffic processing, the full breadth of SSE services, and accessibility to every Netskope customer without surcharges.
Grant Reynolds, Regional Manager for South Africa at Netskope, said “Every year the threat landscape gets bigger and more complex, and the regulatory requirements for data protection grow, so it’s no surprise that we’re seeing the strong growth across Africa. Organizations are eager to adopt an SSE approach to security so they can embrace working practices and cloud technologies that improve productivity while ensuring their security policies adhere to data wherever it goes.”
“However, in practice, you cannot put your security at the ‘edge’ without a strong regional infrastructure as part of a distributed and dedicated service, and that is why we are investing in NewEdge globally. NewEdge is capable of inspecting vast amounts of data locally, without the need for complex, latency-prone backhauling or reliance on unpredictable public transport.” he said.
Netskope has partnered with value-added distributor Exclusive Networks Africa, across the continent, since late last year.
“We investigated multiple cloud vendors to supplement our security strategy, and were attracted by Netskope’s NewEdge Network – the globally distributed private cloud network, which serves as the network foundation for the Netskope platform, as well as the enabler for current and future capabilities of Netskope. We congratulate Netskope on this new development, which will enhance its leadership in the SASE space.” Stefan van de Giessen, Exclusive Networks Africa Country Manager: SA and SADC, said.
As the infrastructure underlying the Netskope Security Cloud, NewEdge delivers real-time inline and out-of-band API-driven services covering Cloud Firewall (FWaaS), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud and SaaS Security Posture Management (CSPM/SSPM), and more.
In addition to accelerating the adoption of a Zero Trust approach, NewEdge’s performance-oriented architecture ensures that there are no performance trade-offs when security is implemented. This approach reduces the risk of users working around security controls, negatively impacting productivity, or slowing or impeding business processes.
Putting data-centric security as close to the user as possible is a key requirement of a SASE-ready architecture and the delivery of Security Service Edge (SSE) abilities. NewEdge’s expanding global scope also addresses unique enterprise business requirements and compliance goals, such as having a regional data center for content localization or to ensure customer traffic stays within of intent-based zones.
In addition, each NewEdge data center is widely viewed across the most commonly used web/CDN, cloud, and SaaS providers to deliver fast, optimized access to the content, apps, and data enterprises value most. For example, each NewEdge data center is directly connected to Microsoft and Google, with other peering relationships in key regions with Amazon, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Box, and Dropbox, among many others.
Funzani Madi, Executive: Information Security (Chief Information Security Officer) for Netskope customer Telkom South Africa said “It is important for us that data processing occurs within our home jurisdiction, providing tangible improvements to the user experience. The new Cape Town NewEdge facility further demonstrates the promise of Netskope on the African continent.
Danie Burger, Information Security Specialist at impact.com, a leading partnership management platform and Netskope customer, added “As a Cape Town-based organization, having a local cloud infrastructure for our security makes a material difference to our users’ experience. With offices and clients around the world, it’s imperative that we don’t create long data flows for security. With infrastructure located in Cape Town, and peered connections to all of our key cloud services, we can introduce in-line security controls, speeding up access to cloud services.”
With more than 1,500 customers, Netskope serves some of the largest and most demanding technical organizations in the world.
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