How Tool Consolidation Reduces Operational Complexity
Author: Ben Norcutt
Release Date: 07/03/2025
Ever felt like this before? Too many tools, too many dashboards and the complexity that comes from integrating them? You’re not alone; this is a common occurrence in SOC’s and NOC’s across the world and it seems like you wake up every morning to attend a meeting to talk about a new tool that the CISO or CIO wants to implement
From Zero-Trust, Shift Left, AI-Powered security, Threat intelligence, CASB, DSPM, CASB, SSPM, RBI, SWG, Endpoint to VPN and beyond there’s a plethora of solutions available in the market today which have increased in the last 10 - 15 years, The global cybersecurity market size is forecast to grow to $345.4bn by 2026 according to Statista.
Today we’re going to look at how a market leader in the SSE and SASE space, Netskope, can help reduce some of the disjointed and non centralised approach that you have when using point solutions from multiple vendors.
SASE is an architecture - a design for bringing together separate security and networking in a way that maximises the value of the cloud this is important for several reasons:
• People working from anywhere on any device
• Digitally native workforce
• Company data is everywhere
• Threats are getting more sophisticated
Tool consolidation aims to address the common problems faced by teams in every organisation today:
1. Overload and Complexity
2. Alert Fatigue
3. Increased Time and Resource Demand
4. Integration Challenges
5. Cost Inefficiency
6. Poor Decision-Making
7. Burnout and Turnover
8. Gaps in Security
Implementation of a SASE and SSE program can be aided by the Netskope solution replacing many point vendor solutions into a single unified solution with unified policy and insights into your most valuable assets, people and data helping address these points.
Lets look at the capabilities of the Netskope solution to address these:
Netskope’s New Edge Network:
Netskope is powered by their New Edge network the largest most performant globally distributed privately owned network and security cloud with full service capabilities available in every location as well a direct peering with large cloud service providers.
Next Generation Secure Web Gateway (NG SWG):
Protects web traffic to any destination providing:
• Web and cloud granular policy controls including instance, activity, and data
• Single pass advanced threat and data
protection with behaviour anomaly detection
• Single cloud console with shared policy controls for SWG, Cloud/SaaS, and DLP
• Mature inline proxy protecting Fortune 100 customers for over eight years
• Cloud performance and global scale to protect any user, device, or location
Includes content and context analysis providing rich metadata for adaptive policy controls.
Cloud Firewall:
Netskope One Firewall enables consolidation, less complexity, and lower cost of operations by delivering firewall services and DNS security from a SASE architecture. It secures outbound traffic across all ports and protocols for users and offices. Policy controls include application and port/protocol, plus user-IDs, group-IDs, fully qualified domains and wildcards as destinations.
Netskope’s bandwidth control guarantees smooth operations and enhances the user experience by prioritising dedicated bandwidth allocation to business-critical applications over non-critical ones.
Remote Browser Isolation:
Netskope One Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) isolates uncategorized and risky websites as an option for Security Service Edge (SSE) and Next Gen Secure Web Gateway (SWG) solutions. Known safe sites are allowed, known bad sites are blocked, and risky websites are isolated for safe viewing all within one cloud platform, one console, and one policy engine.
CASB API:
Using an out-of-band API connection into your sanctioned cloud services to find sensitive content, enforce out-of-band policy controls, and quarantine malware. This deployment option has the advantage of being simple and friction-less to deploy, requiring only a few steps and granting access to the sanctioned app from the Netskope console using OAuth.
The other advantage is that the API connection enables inspection of content that already resides in the sanctioned app. This is not possible with a proxy deployment. There are two limitations to API Data Protection. First, visibility and control is out-of-band, so visibility and control are after-the fact versus proactive and real-time. Second, only sanctioned cloud services are supported.
Public Cloud Security:
Netskope combines both API and real-time policy controls to continuously assess public cloud deployments for risks, threats and compliance issues such as insecure data giving you an up to date accurate overall assessment of your public cloud security.
Netskope Private Access:
Netskope One Private Access connects users anywhere to private resources hosted on-prem or in the cloud, ensuring fast and direct application connectivity and superior user experience.
With Netskope One Private Access architecture, private resources remain hidden and shielded from discovery and attacks. Authenticated users gain secure direct access to authorized applications with end-to-end traffic encryption replacing legacy VPN’s with a Zero Trust Network Architecture.
Integration Opportunity:
Of course, Netskope isn’t going to replace all of your cybersecurity tooling but it can consolidate the functionality provided by multiple point products into a single unified solution, additionally Netskope can integrate with other tools to share and ingest indicators of compromise and other threat intel data using 3rd party integrations.
