Delivering Real-time Cloud Security Without Trading Off Performance

A Netskope White Paper

Published November 2019

delivering-real-time-cloud-security-without-trading-off-performance

There has been a long-standing tradeoff between security and performance, and security often gets the short end of the stick. In today’s digitally-transforming world, performance is more important than ever. Businesses of all types demand high-speed access to online resources for their employees and customers and slowing things down is not an option. When there are problems accessing the network or applications are slow, it can mean anything from reduced productivity and an overwhelmed IT help desk to lost revenue resulting from downtime.

While network teams focus on performance and availability, security teams are tasked with managing risk tied to data breaches. These two goals have traditionally been at odds, given the impact that delivering security can have on performance. For the most part, user experience and ultimately the speed of the business tend to get a higher priority than security. This unwritten rule forces security teams to severely limit the scope of their security controls to methods that don’t impact performance. This ranges from turning off TLS decryption to foregoing inline security altogether and focusing on less intrusive, out-of-band methods of deployment. The result is performance at the expense of security and with the rise of data breaches, this puts the business at risk.

This paper outlines the challenges that impact the ability to deliver high-performant and reliable realtime security and how Netskope addresses these challenges with one of the world’s largest and fastest security networks.