You can connect to SaaS applications, like Workday, Office 365, or Dropbox. There are hundreds of SaaS applications. A remote user can connect to some kind of gateway or be assisted by a gateway connection from his home, and he would then connect through that gateway to a broker, a broker with basically the CASB as a broker, and the broker would then put that layer of security too.
A lot of people sell the solution, including Palo Alto. You've got Skyhigh Networks, which was the leader of CASB and then they were acquired by McAfee, and then now they've broken off into Skyhigh Security. They still have the CASB and they're still considered a market leader.
They were very, very aggressive in the market to get a new market share or to take over market share while other companies were being broken up.
It's a really easy product. It is a pretty straightforward product. The only thing that Skyhigh doesn't is what Palo Alto does - they don't do any kind of a software-defined WAN, SD-WAN. If you have different circuits to utilize different bandwidth across different media and also set up redundancy links and that kind of stuff, that's all the SD-WAN. They do not have SD-WAN, Skyhigh Security does not have SD-WAN. Palo Alto does.
They were real big on the secure services, edge SSE and zero-trust network architecture type deployments. A lot of that stuff coming out of the networking and when things moved to a cloud, you have what's called sanction IP, which is basically, what we always knew as an internal network in all the security and firewalls and everything about that and then as things moved to the cloud, business to business type stuff and then you start having what's called shadow IP. That's when you have to build all the firewall policy infrastructure in the cloud to emulate what we were doing down inside of a business, connecting servers or PCs or network switches and that kind of stuff. However, infrastructure as a service is doing the same type of functions yet they're cloud services and not physical network services, or switches, meaning there's no mounting it in the rack and that kind of stuff.
You have got a lot of people in the industry now like Netskope and a lot of people in that space. You can't really say one's better than the other. They all were built off the original architecture and what a CASB is, however, maybe they scale better, and maybe their brand of deployment is stronger.
You have to have some kind of background with cloud-based security, like working with different providers and how to make instances in the clouds and that kind of stuff - including cloud, networking cloud, cloud application development, anything like that is a requirement to be in the CASB space.
The stability has been good. it's a reliable solution.
As a cloud solution, it's easily scalable.
You can spin up an instance of something in the cloud or cloud providers a lot faster than deploying network infrastructure switches, routers, and all that stuff. Plus, you can tier down. There's a lot of flexibility you can do with cloud services versus native on-prem services.
Technical support is okay. We haven't had a problem with them.
I'm also familiar with Palo Alto.
You have to have some kind of background with cloud-based security, like working with different providers and how to make instances in the clouds and that kind of stuff - including cloud, networking cloud, cloud application development, anything like that is a requirement to be in the CASB space.
There are a lot of testing requirements and things that people have to go through to create in the CASB industry. Netskope didn't get a leg up as they were like the CrowdStrike of the EDRs.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
