Netskope rolls out NewEdge’s seamless localized experience

Netskope has unveiled the completion of the rollout of Localization Zones to its NewEdge security private cloud offering a localized experience for 220 countries and territories, including every non-embargoed UN member state.

While a move to a cloud web proxy or Security Service Edge (SSE) solution brings significant advantages in terms of security coverage and reduction of management overhead, maintaining a localized user experience has been a challenge for enterprises. Users can be met with a broken experience – websites and applications serving the wrong content or potentially in a different language – based on the location of the web security service or SSE data center, not the user. In extreme cases, access to entire websites or applications can be blocked entirely.

With 205 Localization Zones, in addition to Netskope’s current footprint of full compute data centers in 71 regions, Netskope’s global coverage provides a localized experience for over 220 countries and territories.

Combined with native support for per-customer Dedicated Egress IPs — without requiring any performance-sapping backhauling — Netskope meets the most demanding requirements of customers adopting security services in the cloud or looking to consolidate multiple disparate security functions into a unified platform while achieving the highest levels of security, performance, and reliability.

First rolled out in February 2023, Localization Zones deliver the same digital experience for customers as going direct-to-net, regardless of where they are accessing from. Customers benefit from native language and localized content support for websites, as well as access to geo-fenced content and applications, even if there is no in-country data center.

“Data residency is one thing, and user experience is another. We use more than 80 of Netskope’s NewEdge global data centres to meet our data processing compliance requirements, but for a truly global business like ours, compliance alone is not enough,” said David Mann, Managing Director – Information Security & Infrastructure Services at PageGroup.

“Netskope’s NewEdge Localization Zones mean that our data routing decisions don’t determine things like the language that our employees search results are returned in – or the geographical IP-restricted web services that they are able to access. This gives Netskope much more freedom to make performance-based routing decisions to maximize user experience and enhance resilience,” Mann added.

Over the last 18 months, Netskope has also completed a number of enhancements to the NewEdge private cloud platform, including:

• Growth of its global footprint of regions powered by full compute data centers by more than 40%, each offering a complete SSE stack including Cloud Firewall, SWG, inline CASB, ZTNA, and data and threat protection continuing to drive down on ramp latency and enhance the user experience
• Addition of a significant presence in Mainland China, providing fast and reliable access to both domestic and international applications and content
• Significant expansion of global Management Plane footprint, more than doubling the number of regions available, including Management Planes across the United States and the European Union (EU), Australia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, helping customers meet data privacy and compliance requirements
• Continued enhancements of the ‘connectedness’ of its infrastructure with more than 3000 adjacencies to more than 620 unique ASNs today, reducing latency on the first and last mile, further enhancing the user and application experience

“With NewEdge, customers aren’t forced to make trade-offs when it comes to security, user experience, and performance,” said Jason Hofmann, SVP of Platform Strategy and Architecture at Netskope.

“Our customers benefit from something that no other vendor can match — a user experience that is indistinguishable from direct-to-net for virtually every user on the planet, not only from a throughput and latency point-of-view, which was a milestone we achieved a few years ago, but now also from a content localization standpoint. Whether working from a hotel in Barbados, an airport in Bahrain, a branch office in Brazil, a factory in Bangladesh, or a home in Belgium, the user experience is preserved. This holds true even for the smallest countries in the world — countries whose entire populations could fit in a small football stadium — such as Tuvalu or Palau,” Hofmann concluded.