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Netskope and Eperi Partnership Means CASB Consolidation Nears Its End – Good News for Consumers

Recent strategic partnerships, including that recently announced by Netskope and eperi, signal that consolidation within the cloud access security broker (CASB) market is likely at an end. This is good news for consumers.

This partnership announcement promises solid integration between eperi’s Cloud Data Protection Gateway and Netskope’s CASB offering. Integrating eperi’s data protection with Netskope’s access management will give customers a greater ability to push cloud security down to the data level. Companies will be able to use their CASB’s visibility over Software-as-a-Service to encrypt data even in SaaS environments.

Source: Netskope

Billy Bond, Netskope’s vice-president of business development, explained, “Customers need to ensure that their data is securely and appropriately stored and shared in the cloud. Our partnership with eperi, and our complementary technologies, furthers our ability to deliver more substantive security value to enterprises whose perimeters continue dissolving as data moves into the cloud.”

Our Take

This partnership, announced soon after the CipherCloud/Thales engagement, suggests that significant consolidation has likely come to an end in the CASB market. All major cloud software vendors have already either acquired or built their own CASB offerings, which are now integrated with other cloud security systems.

This leaves a still-crowded market of pure-play CASB vendors, such as Netskope, looking for ways to rise above the crowd. One of the key strategies, as we are now seeing, is forging partnerships with pure-play vendors in complementary markets.

This is all good news for consumers for two big reasons. First, it means that consumers can opt to work with a pure-play vendor without fear that their vendor will be snatched up at any moment by the likes of Oracle or IBM. And second, customers should welcome any partnerships that help reduce confusion within the larger cloud security field.