Name: SASE in action: Cutting latency and boosting security in a high-growth fintech
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T10:08:08.761Z
Duration: 52 min 8 s
Description: SASE in action: Cutting latency and boosting security in a high-growth fintech

Transcript for "SASE in action: Cutting latency and boosting security in a high-growth fintech": Central European region at Netskope. Today we have a webinar together with our partner SAPIO and we talk about SASE in action. SASE is short for Secure Access Service Edge and one of the fastest growing technologies in cybersecurity because it consolidates lots of point products from the networking and security space to provide a better user experience and improves the security on top. Today specifically, we cover how we cut latency and improve the security at a hyper growth fintech. With that, I hand over to Georg, who will be one of the two speakers. Yeah. My name is Georg Cameron. I'm working as a senior solution engineer here at Netskope. I'm here for five years and together with me is Cameron. Over to you. Hi. I'm Cameron Bales. I'm the technical services manager at SAPI. I head of the professional services team. SAPIOR are a UK cybersecurity specialist, we focus purely in cybersecurity. We help organisations understand risk and make confident board level security decisions. We cover things like resilience consulting, technology advisory and managed security services, as well as professional services. All right, thank you. Before we dig into the interview and what we covered today, I want to give a brief intro into the Netskoe platform. I remember the days where I first wrote my first security concept for a company. It was twenty years back. And it was about protecting the data center and the headquarter of the company. Everyone worked from the office and it was quite easy to protect this castle. Yeah. In the meantime, things changed a little bit. So we have something like remote workers or home office users and we need to protect them the same way. This fact makes a little bit difficult And other questions are arising, like do we backhaul all traffic or do we split traffic? And this is one of the top reasons customers starting to look into SASE or as Matthias mentioned already. And the Netskope created a cloud native platform to support this transformation into a SASE world. This platform has been built to address the, I would say two main use case areas. One is external, right? To protect the users when they are accessing a website and managed SaaS application like Office three sixty five or, Google Drive, whatever, you know, managed or approved by your IT. But also the big portion of unmanaged SaaS applications, also known as shadow IT. These are could be a PDF converted tools, generative AI. Whatever tools you are thinking about, using in the cloud is called here as an unmanaged SaaS application. And our platform is, is built for making this activity visible and also giving you control mechanisms. The other access area or the, use case area is the private traffic on the on the right hand side. Traditional way was to for for a user or for a company was that their users are connecting with a VPN client to a VPN gateway and accessing a complete network. Yeah. That opens a big risk or a security gap. Once this client is compromised, you have, you have a big potential problem. And this is where we have like a zero trust network access module where we don't longer connect the user to a complete network, but to applications. Only to the applications he is allowed to use. So at least privileged model, in terms of Right? But Netskope just not built a platform by itself, but also the network on which it operates. And this platform is built for speed and performance. I would say this is one of the top advantages customers gain if they are investing in those kind of platforms. Whenever your user is protected by Netskope, we connect you to the nearest data center and you have the best overall performance. For example, on all of these dots you see here in this map, we have a peering partnership with Microsoft, Google, Akamai, other big providers, many thousands of those peering partnerships have been implemented to provide you with the best performance. And what we also offer with this, you see these dots or point of presence, as we say, are full compute data center. So in every of those locations we have the full capability of providing you a complete filtering of the traffic and complete control of cloud and web applications. So but speed is nothing without brains. So in the middle of the last slide, have seen, that we have something called Zero Trust Engine. And this is actually the brain, which comes with the platform. That is the Z Trust engine is nothing you can buy from us. This is our philosophy and our, I would say, yeah, brain when it comes to decoding and decrypting the traffic. So we see every transaction from a user perspective. We see the identity of a user. We see the device he is working on. Is it a managed or unmanaged device? We see the location of a user, the application, if it's trusted or a non trusted application. And we And this is, I would say, where the Netskope magic is starting. We provide you with deep visibility into the application, not only that the user is using Copilot here, but also giving you deep visibility and understanding of the instance. Is it the company or private instance? The activity the user is performing up to the data context. What kind of data is leaving my network? What kind of data, is my user posting to applications like Copilot, ChatGPT or, OneDrive. And last but not least, we can react differently to those kind of things, right? We can not only just allow and block, but we can also coach, re authenticate the user or we can justify a specific action the user just performed. This is quite important when it comes to controlling. You can have specific features enabled on the next gen firewall or on the on premise proxy, but you will never get gain the deep visibility without Netskope and the ZuTrust engine. So remembering, it's first of all the speed what we're providing, but also the brain who is giving you the control mechanisms. All right. That was the short overview over the platform, what we also positioned with the customer. What we want to do next is to give you a little journey, with this specific customers, but also make it a technical exchange between, Cameron and myself. So I will be the interviewer for him, and, he will answering, the specific things, and we will make it a little bit like a back and forth communication. Whenever you have specific questions, don't hesitate to drop them in the question section. And we will cover those six main points positioning for sure our platform, but also what kind of journey the customer had when moving to Netskope. So let's jump into the initial situation. So, Cameron, we know each other, and we have both worked on the project on many of those. So I want to hear about your insights and what specifically what the security architecture looked like before the customer started to evaluate Netloop? Yeah. So in this particular instance, a customer had some basic web filtering and separate solutions for the remote access VPN. They were doing a few things right and they needed that more visibility and control in other aspects like in line CASB, DLP, etcetera. All right. And specific challenges, what you say was the customer facing or specifically to in areas where cloud comes in place or protecting their web usage or even data security? It is that visibility, really. So without that deep packet inspection and the SSL decryption, we can do sort of basic content web filtering. But once we apply some of those elements, we can see further our people uploading to risky cloud storage, as well as other, benefits you get in terms of, inline CASB and DLP, etcetera. Right. For me, one of the most important points for sure is the criteria when selecting a new platform. Like, you have all seen this slide before where we show Netskope one as a consolidated platform. But what is the, what you say is the most important criteria when, choosing that kind of a platform? Yeah, very good point. It has to be simple, intuitive and powerful at the same time. So even readable policies where someone can understand exactly what that policy's intent is, is very important when selecting a platform. But also to back it up with the capabilities, know, some feature rich elements where we can apply those levels of controls like application instance awareness, you get with inline CASB and apply best practice DLP policies that customers are wanting to achieve ultimately with the platform. Yeah, when I speak with customers it's quite important, you know, for me that we are solving actual problems, that we are not talking about, okay, we are here is your problem, dear customer. And we have, by the way, a solution for it. But you said a really important thing, which is simplifying, you know, simplifying not only administration from a UI perspective, but also simplifying operation when it comes to user management or when when my users are working from anywhere. That was also one of the most important criteria here. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Let's dig into the decision process a little bit deeper. So what made the customer choose NetScope by the end of the day? Yeah, so I think in this instance, the customer is looking for a platform that could address secure web access, cloud security, data protection, and private application access in a consistent way. Netskope stood out because it combined these capabilities into a single cloud native platform rather than forcing them into separately stitched solutions. Yeah. Yeah. And what I also want to mention here is the strong partnership between you guys from SAPIO and Netskope. It's a good feeling for the customer if he, you know, knows that the partner is capable to implement those things, that he has experience when moving into infrastructure service like Netskope and stuff like that. So that was also one criteria for the customer choosing Netskope over our competition? Yeah, we like to stay close in the POVs and understand the customer's requirements very early on in these engagements and build that sort of relationship. And ultimately, the more we know, the more we can understand what they want to achieve and how best to achieve that within different teams. They may have different sort of different teams may have different goals as well. So absolutely, that partnership and that relationship is very important part of the process. Yeah. And was there a specific capability you would say that clearly stood out for the customer. Any specific feature or functionality which helps to drive this project forward? Yeah, ultimately it was a deep visibility into those cloud and web usage combined with that data centric security. So the ability to understand not just where users go, but what are they doing with that data was the key differentiator. Yeah. So you remember the slide I've just shown with the Zero Trust engine? That's not only just the marketing slide. It really becomes practical when the customer starts evaluating Netskope services. And for me and also for this customer, was quite important to have, you know, the visibility into those services. Yeah. Not that the user is using OneDrive, but he's uploading data. Okay. Data uploads are allowed into cloud storage services. But what kind of data is that? Yeah. It's is it sensitive data or is it just a picture, stuff like that. So these are really key differentiators, deep visibility into cloud to usage. Alright. And how how important was the platform approach, compared to a point solution? I mean, are multiple solutions on the market like, you know, SWIC solutions or, web functionality on the next gen firewall. Yeah, mean, this instance, it was critical. They wanted fewer vendors, fewer agents, unified policy model. That platform approach significantly reduces complexity and improves consistency across the web cloud and those private applications. So that was key for the customer. Yeah. So just to make it clear here, this, I would say, ability to consolidate different products into one policy even. So that was where the customer was impressed about. Okay. Now I'm creating a secure web gateway policy, but on the same page, can, switch to an application policy for my private applications, and this is all done in one UI. So that's that that unique or platform approach is is really is is really unique into the in in the market. Okay. We already touched a little bit on visibility and cloud insight, but maybe a few more examples or few more questions around this capability. How was the visibility into cloud services maybe changed since implementing Netskope? Is it significantly different or? Yeah, it was substantial according to the customer. They now have real time granular visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services, including user behavior, data movement, risk posture. So the whole shadow IT with that SSL decryption really, really gives them that visibility and control. Yeah. And that is quite funny when customers starting to migrate to Netskope and they see, okay, what kind of not only what kind of cloud services they are using, but the amount of services is quite impressive. Even smaller customers of 2,000 users using more than 300, 500, thousands of cloud applications. And so you will be really impressed by the number itself, but also the ability to get rid of all the unsanctioned applications. How valuable would you say is this granular visibility into users, activities and the data flows? Yeah, foundational really allows customers to make informed policy decisions based on actual usage and risk rather than assumptions. Yeah, very, very powerful. Yeah. And additionally, what we did is we found out some security risks during the test, which gave us an additional push to move forward. And also shows the capability that we are not only just showing data flows or user activity but also having a robust malware engine up to a cloud sandbox that that is able to say, okay, is it is it really good, data or is good data I'm downloading here? Is it bad? Is it malicious content? Stuff like that. So we haven't proved that in in the test. Yeah. And that was, quite a big push for this project. Yeah. How has the approach to shadow IT, changed in practice? So once we have found out, okay, we have now 500 applications in use from our users, has there any change done or what do you say? What was the best practice going forward? Yeah, it's really helped because the customers moved from sort of a blocking by default mentality to a risk based enablement model. So with Netskope, they can safely allow cloud services which controlled data usage. You've got that application instance awareness. So if we can understand that these are sanctioned GenAI applications and my users, maybe they should be warned or coached that they don't want to upload sensitive information and the best way to change user behavior is that just in time coaching. Absolutely. One of the greatest functionalities I see from the Netskope client is this coaching functionality. Just to make the user aware. And it's putting the user into the support process. Right? It's giving him a feedback. Hey, you are currently uploading data to an unsecure cloud storage service. Please use the corporate one. Or you are just uploading sensitive data to a specific cloud application, which is not allowed by our security policy. You can also redirect them, which is a really cool capability as well. So if they've gone to an unsanctioned cloud storage, redirect them to the corporate standard or just in time. Yeah. And just to make it clear here, we don't want to overload the customers with our best practice policy or the capability. We are going as fast you adapt the technology. So we are showing in our best practice policy in the test how we move forward and give you an idea what kind of security controls you have with Netskope. It's not the way that we are forcing you to implement every policy, but we give you a clear idea how to get control over this cloud usage, over how you can define those policies. So the best practice policy is not to show, hey, are our use cases for you, customer please test this and then you can go forward. No, it's about the customer problem and then solving it, regaining this control, over lost data. And that helped a lot by basically also pushing this best practice policy afterwards in production. Alright. A really important topic we want to touch on is data protection and zero trust. Cameron, what do you think, what role played the data security part in this project and the overall strategy today? Yeah, data security is central. Users, devices, locations are increasingly dynamic. So protecting the data itself is the most reliable control point. So very key. Yeah. So do you have a specific example for that or can you? I guess in terms of location, if a user is accessing certain data from a location that's unknown, that they don't have an office in, that can increase the visibility in terms of should that be allowed, is that some road behavior, As well as having DLP policies to discover. A lot of customers are in a stage where they are just embarking on that DLP journey. And we often go about introducing DLP by having a discovery model. So we would place discovery policies in place and that allows users to understand some risky behaviors that are happening, be it based on location, device trust, as well as the data itself. Is it PCI data or is it PII data, etcetera? All right. Yeah. And this is quite important. Every action we do, when it comes to data protection or DLP, is to reduce the risk. So you have different, I would say control points where you can implement data protection policies even without touching the data. Yeah, I mean remembering this Zero Trust engine model. So every pillar you see on this slide here, every pillar has its own control point. Yeah, Looking from an identity perspective, is the user or user group allowed to access? Yes or no. Is the device managed or unmanaged? And even if the you can check with the Netskope client if the the engine of the endpoint solution is up to date. Right? If if the there is a specific certificate or if the is the user domain joined, stuff like that. So if is is he accessing these applications from the home office or from their office location? Yeah. What about the application itself? Yeah. Then is he logged into a personal or company instance? So we as a company have Office three sixty five implemented all over the place and now we are, giving the users the ability to log in and to use those services. But I can log into those applications by, by using my personal credentials, which in fact is, you know, working in a different cloud storage. It's my personal one instead of the company one. So I I lose control over the data, so you can jump in whenever user is logging into a personal instance. Hey. I I want to make you aware that there is a company instance in place, so please upload or use this service instead of your private one. Activities are also important. Not every, activity is critical. Upload, for example, download or share are more critical than maybe lock in activities. So also putting this into perspective. So is the user the leading 500 documents? Is there a specific behavior trust, we can see or a risky behavior, where we need to jump in and make the user aware of it? Or is, is the user uploading sensitive content to this cloud storage? And that's what the, I would say, Zero Trust engine is all about. Yeah, exactly that, you know, so before you've even got to the data, you have all those levels of control. I like to describe it as like a reverse pyramid in terms of your sort of data protection or so that identity is that first layer that everyone's trying to target and then the data is ultimately what threat actors are trying to get to. So you have all these levels of defense and the ability to do things like risky behavior, as well as uploads as a critical one that most companies care about, their data exfiltrating their sanctioned instance applications. So yeah, absolutely. Before you even get to that data trust, there's many levels of defense there. Yeah, like an onion, like layers of onion you can think of before you actually get to the data and maybe it's a good good point to maybe show you a little demo how this looks in real life. I'm currently locked in to Microsoft, and I can use Copilot as I'm used to. So I can ask what is, Cypio doing. Yeah. So I will get my response as I'm I'm used to. And that's that's quite the, you know, usage of a customer. So but once I'm uploading specific specific data, I'm like, let's say, I'm uploading a script here and I want to ask Copilot to modify it to to make it a little bit more performant. My DLP engine jumps in and say, hey, please pay attention. You are uploading data here. And by the way, I haven't categorized this data. I haven't labeled anything. The Netskope DLP engine jumps in, right, and and detects, okay, this is source code data, and I'm I'm, blocking this content because this is, basically, against their policy. Right? This is what the message is saying. So I can use the service, but when I'm uploading the data, checking the content, that the Netskope client, is blocking, jumping in and blocking here. Alright. Back to the questions. That was a little off topic, but I think quite important to understand the capability here. So how does Netskope help to protect this sensitive data regardless of where they reside? Has there been an, I would say, data protection engine already been in place? Has documents been labeled, categorized? Yeah, like you said, a lot of customers may not have sensitivity labels or Google labels enabled and you don't need that. It helps sometimes to identify, but you know the engine can do that full inspection of that document and look for, you know, is it actual credit card data? And that's the other differentiator I've seen you know, we're not just looking for 16 digit card numbers. We're actually seeing is this an Amex or a Visa card that is real. So DLP capabilities, whether you use out of the box or you customize, really enforces that DLP policy across the web traffic and the cloud applications and private applications. This sort of unified approach ensures data protection follows the data, not the network perimeter. Yeah. I don't have this question in the slide, but I often hear the complaint from customers, hey, DLP or data protection projects are quite complicated. What would you say specifically to them? Not only focusing on that project, but also with other customers. Yeah, keep it simple. You know, DLP is a journey and the first stage is to use out of the box policies that these identifiers there's over 3,000 built in identifiers in Netskope, it's PCI data, PI data or region specific ones. Use them to discover the risky behaviour that potentially is happening. Then you can move on to coaching and blocking with evidence based factual information that you've discovered over that period of time. So this strategy, crawl, walk, run, is the best way that we've seen at SAPIER how customers adopt the DLP. I like what we were talking about, you don't have to have basically labels. They do help because it speeds up the ability to identify particularly sensitive data, but it's not essential. Yeah, absolutely. So I like this approach a lot because it first of all shows you how big the problem is before you act and then we advise you what kind of you know, actions do you have to do, what kind of policies you need to implement before blocking or coaching the user. You can get in alert mode, getting the insight, what kind of data is leaving your network, and then you see how big the problem really is. Alright. Let's dig into operations and integrations. What would you say? How complex was the implementation integration, into this into the existing environment? It was very straightforward. You know, the integration with the IDP, again, you know, MetScope will integrate with all the major IDPs, in this case, whether it's M365 or Okta. With the endpoint EDR solutions as well, that sort of two way IOC sharing and tools working better together. Again, that's very straightforward. So major vendors like CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender, etcetera, they're all covered. So yeah, the existing security stack was quite common, what we come across with a lot of customers. And yeah, we are able to roll out in the POV up to 100 users and to the confidence level from the customers so much so even before purchasing, were ready to migrate and they needed to move quickly as well. So within a week post purchase, they're up and running with a thousand users all implemented with this great level of visibility and control. Yeah, I think it's quite significant to mention that one. It's that we had multiple hundreds of users even in the POV, right? Because the customer, okay, I see the benefit. I want to go with Nasco, but I need to really move forward really quick. And so not really usual process what we have, but, it shows that we are really agile and ready to migrate as fast as the customer wants to go. Exactly that. We adapt to the pace of the customer. If there's a requirement that we have to move things quickly because they have to move from another solution, it's expiring, for example, or whether they want to do it in a phased approach in a much more controlled manner where it's a production pilot, then each person in each business function, the common two strategies that we come across. Yeah. So we have been together in the POVChem. And, you know, when when you select a solution like like Netskope, you have to change your, I would say, day to day operations. What was the experience for you and the customer? Leveraging a solution like NetScope? The key thing is it's so simple and intuitive. Policies are centrally managed. It's not too confusing. And you can leverage that role based access. Because in this particular example, we had two different teams. We had a security team that wanted to manage the secure gateway side. And we had cloud builder team that wanted to manage the private applications. One team were predominantly using the UI, Ufi Netskope UI to manage and gain that visibility. Whereas the other team, they're fully into automation and the Terraform to code with cloud. So it worked great. And that role based access gave them that sort of separation that needed in the different parts of Netskope, as well as the approach and how they managed it. Absolutely. I mean, this is quite important also that this build has also, or platform has been built for automating things. How I get faster to what I'm aiming for? Right? If it comes to deployment of, or creation of hundreds or thousands of application or extracting this data into a different platform to analyzing the events, stuff like that. So it's really important to have APIs supporting that. Absolutely. We're seeing a growing trend with customers doing really intelligent stuff with data they can get from one platform like Netskope into other sort of platforms and having sort of automation playbooks that trigger various events based upon discovery of data. And at the end of the day, would you say, have we achieved you know, this kind of consolidation or simplifying processes for the customer? Most definitely. Yeah. So, you know, we've just gone from content filtering and disparate sort of VPN solutions into a unified platform across the board, secure with gateway private applications and that inline CASB and DLP for the data protection. Right. I mean, this is not only advertising a real life example, I would say, how this could look like. Even teams are separated, have totally different functions or different goals inside of a company. A unified platform with this role based approach, you just say, was I would say the winner here. To say, okay, you are working in an infrastructure team, you have that right to modify your stuff And the security team is managing the company security policy for accessing cloud and web applications. Exactly. And throughout the PRB process, building that sort of relationship with the customer, we understand these two different teams and how they like to operate differently. We accommodated that in separate sessions to give them that sort of peace of mind that how simple Intuitive is going to be, that the platform has got everything they need to make their lives easier. All right, maybe a last point regarding our centralised policy management. How important was that for their daily business? So when you are selecting a solution like Netskope, I think the processes internally will change as well. How you deal with support cases, how you deal with, you know, analyzing, specific things or if you look into a report. Is it, you know, different UIs you look into, or is it, maybe from from your eyes or from your experience? Yeah, it was absolutely critical. That single policy framework, reducing errors and improves that governance and compliance that you need from a security perspective across the board. So those central reports and capabilities all in a single platform massively helps the organization. Nice. Last but not least, we have, three questions left, which are, I would say, what we considered as a lesson learned or how we measured that. Looking back to the project and we did together, what are, I would say, your key benefits or your advice, you know, going into that platform approach? So I think we did great with building that rapport with the customer, understanding the different business functions early in the POV. So, you know, working with Netskope and a partner that can truly provide value and experience in delivering projects like this is paramount. And, know, that was the biggest lesson really is getting in there early understanding the customer, the architecture, the integration and yeah, we adapted to their pace, we understood that they needed to move fast. So all of that is key and the biggest lesson for me is getting in there early with the customer and building that relationship. Last but not least, what strategic role does Netco play in IT and security roadmaps for you as a partner? Not only and what would be, I would say, your first step advice to move on? Yeah, so for me, you know, it is like a core strategic platform that underpins that zero trust and cloud first strategy. So we're seeing, you were saying earlier, your average company, even the small organizations have hundreds of SaaS applications gaining that visibility and that control and enforcing controls around that and leveraging that Zero Trust engine. Is the most important thing in security. Since the post pandemic and the rise of remote working, this is by far the number one area that we're seeing customers from a security budget perspective looking to consolidate and go for that platform play in total SASE or SSD? Right. SASE, we started with SASE and SSE with this architect approach. And I think this is quite important to understand. First of all, the customer really needs to think about how we can move on, how can we modernize our security infrastructure, how can we modernize our, you know, network infrastructure? How is can Netskope look like? And this is what we did with this customer as well, that we did an architecture workshop. So this is not the customer architecture, but, a quite simple example how we use, also, this kind of architecture workshops to show how the Netskope platform can look like in your environment. From an integration perspective, is there an easy way to integrate with our SIEM? Is there an easy way to integrate with IDP? How does that look like? So, are there any benefits by integrating our endpoint solution like CrowdStrike or SentinelOne? So different kind of things we can tackle, also afterwards. It's not maybe the first thing we do, but that's quite important how that can look like. And we do it on a use case by use case scenario. So we first of all think, okay, how do you see your remote workers? How do we connect HQ branches to the Netskoe platform? So that looks a little bit complicated, but I've drawn out some use case here just to give you some insights how that can look like as well for you. And saying that, I have some action items. Cam, first of all, thank you for your attendance and for your insights into this project and how you deal with other customers. My advice would be also to to review the architecture diagrams. So we have really good content reference architectures for modernizing VPN and, also the modernizing, your secure security web gateway, proxies. And then you can see it by yourself. Yeah. Contact SAP or contact Medscope for a demo. How specific use cases looks in real life? Plan a follow-up session with Netskope for an architecture workshop. Like I mentioned before, when it comes to architecture, that is really critical and will be a driver forward so that you have an evidence, Okay, that could be the first step into this kind of architecture and then moving on. And last but not least, you have to prove the value of the Medscape solution, by doing a PoV, PoC, seeing that in your environment. And, we would love to do so, together with our partners, APU. So contact us, plan a follow-up session, and thanks for your attendance. Thank you.