Hey channel insiders, I'm your host Katie Bavoso and welcome to this episode of Partner POV brought to you by Netscope. The federal government is under mounting pressure to modernize its IT systems while protecting sensitive data across cloud, remote, and hybrid environments. Today we're diving into how secure service edge technologies are helping agencies strengthen their zero trust strategies and why Netscope has become a key player in enabling that transformation.
Joining me now to discuss what makes this market so complex, where the opportunities lie, and how partners can play a vital role in securing the nation's digital infrastructure is Mark Mitchell, federal security architect at Netscope. Welcome, Mark. Great to see you. >> Thank you. Thank you very much, Katie. It's good to be here. >> It's great to have you. Let's dig right into it. First of all, what makes securing federal IT environments uniquely complex compared to say the commercial sector and how has that complexity evolved with cloud adoption and hybrid work? >> There's quite a bit to unpack in that.
I would say some of the the larger challenges obviously we have compliance frameworks we have to to adhere to but we also have uh for the most part larger environments there are hybrid environments um and those hybrid environments may be hybrid as in cloud and a typical data center on premise environment but also may be federated amongst other agencies as well as you have a lot of antiquated cloud application and on-prim application architecture that you have to deal with and reconcile as you look at say modernization efforts and trying to protect ultimately sensitive data. >> Some very good points there and very straightforward for what I know is a complicated subject that we could probably spend the entire time today talking about but >> so for the sake of time let's move on to the next question.
Why is secure service edge or SSE in some cases becoming such a critical part of the federal government's modernization and zerorust initiatives? >> So SSSE, secure service edge, sassy, secure access service edge. I think you know we love in the fed space our acronyms. I think if we take a step back and think about what are both of those ideas, what do they mean? What do they do? It is moving security services to the edge, helping push the threats outside of the network onto an edge where you have at the edge of your boundary.
The ability to see risks and understand anomalies, but also how to be able to better manage your customers, whether that be users within the environment or customers of the data that an agency is is managing. be able to have a more performant access to those services. >> Moving on from there, how is Netscope and its platform well suited to mitigate these challenges in the federal government space? >> In my current role as a federal architect or security architect um servicing the mostly civilian environment, but the federal environment.
Prior to that, I was an enterprise security architect in the federal government. So you'll hear hear me answer some of these from that hat and that perspective. I think in this case that's an important one because the network meaning your access to a service and how you reach out and access that service whether that be your network meaning a leased line your own gateways or using the internet or another broker as the middle mile connection. That is a very important part because that is where servicing of any of the security services comes from and if you don't have adequate performance then there's going to be another path because at the end of the day security is here to support business to support the agency reaching its mission and if it's inadequate in doing that then another solution or another platform would have to fill that bill.
So for Netscope understanding that as well as we do roughly eight nine years ago went down the path of building our own network. So there is no reliance on public cloud infrastructure as an example. We're able to kind of control not only our own technical destiny, but also in peering with services directly also control that performance and and be able to manage what a user's experience looks like connecting to a cloud service while also being able to layer in a myriad of security controls that all fall under the the SSE kind of platform.
So, I'm going to have you dig into that a little bit more because you mentioned some of those unique differentiators, but I'd also like to know what you think of when you think of what differentiates Netscope from the competition when it comes to how you serve the federal space. What comes to mind? >> It would be um on a couple of fronts. Not just that performance aspect. I don't think I can emphasize that enough. Again from my experience also in implementing and managing these things it always appears easy in the beginning to assess a service as you know apples and apples meaning I'm going to go and look for a cloud access security control platform I want DLP I want thread right and we compare those things but at the end of the day if you can't run those services meaning you're opening up the packets It's reading them and re-encrypting them and sending them on.
If you can't do that in a performant manner and it's not flexible enough for you to be able to do that in a performant manner, then there's going to be a lot of issues from that implementation. So that definitely is one. The other I would say and I just kind of touched on it there is the flexibility meaning to have one platform, one cloud, one client that singularity provides a lot of flexibility in how you apply stuff. One of the things that um I'm sure we'll talk about in further detail um for me is visibility.
As you get visibility through a service like Netscope, which will be far and wide, um you will start to discover use cases you didn't know exist. And I think having the ability, the flexibility to apply a new capability to address those as they come up without having to go through additional uh implementations, additional acquisitions. It's about being able to quickly deploy a new capability because the the platform contains all of them is something that from experience I know is a a huge benefit. >> What role do channel partners play in this effort when it comes to serving the federal space with Netscope? >> Channel partners are are huge because they have the pulse of the agencies.
They understand the missions. They have the connections within the contacts within the agencies to really understand what are the pain points, where is the strategy moving. Perhaps a strategy is shifting a little bit. They understand where that is and what the gaps are and what the agency really needs to be able to remediate those. Um, so I think first and foremost it's being an advocate of that agency and having the partnership with that agency to really understand where their mission is going and what the uh strategy is looking for as far as um any kind of security implementation or or architecture change. >> Very well said, Mark.
How about for partners looking to break into or expand within the federal market? what roadblocks do they typically encounter and how can Netscope help them overcome those as a partner? >> Yeah, that's a great question because and again this will be me putting my Fed hat back on as someone who has dealt with partners um as a federal employee doing you know these types of architectures just in the same regard as the relationship and understanding the mission.
It also comes to being able to outline those capabilities and be able to have a flexible enough platform that they can interact with that streamlines their work and how they would engage with that agency. So in the case of my experience when I was in the Fed space, the partner I was dealing with understood the zero trust architecture I'd put together, what that strategy looked like on a 3, five, sevenyear plan, and then went out to look for capabilities. in their search for capabilities and trying to put together some kind of you know proof of concept and outline how something may get done.
They found that it took less pieces. It was more succinct and the ability to deploy which ultimately speaks to kind of total cost of ownership was you know a fraction of a multi-art strategy using multiple tools to achieve what essentially is the same thing in one service security service edge platform. How does Netscope make it easier for partners to serve customers in the federal space, especially when it comes to the strict compliance requirements that we often associate with this specific sector? >> And again, I think the flexibility and the simplicity of the platform being one client, one cloud, one environment that leads to a simplified deployment.
It leads to a faster time to implement which gives more time to developing policies and understanding how you're aligning to that mission and that strategy or that agenda and goal. Typically those are guided by compliance requirements and it kind of depends on the use case. Um there's as an example from a posture management perspective, right? U you could have baselines that you're running from the platforms. That's a more direct way the platform could help with compliance requirements, but there's also policies that could be put in place.
And that again, being able to get the platform up and running quickly means that I can start putting in policies that follow the context of where a user can or cannot connect to. uh given a compliance requirement on perhaps country lists that you know you can't have data going to or coming from. So I think in that vein there's a lot of different uh policies and applications you have put together that help along a myriad of compliance requirements whether those be high level like zero trust memorandum or more detailed like 2131 and what you should be logging which you know has various levels of advanced uh logging EL1 to three um of which Netscope already has the visibility from all of those areas including user behavior analytics which I think again means a partner coming in can immediately demonstrate benefit. >> What makes an ideal Netsco partner in the federal sector?
So I'm asking you specifically from your perspective what you're looking for. Are there specific capabilities or certifications that set successful partners apart? >> Yes, there are. But also there isn't. That's a perfect enterprise architecture answer. And for those of you who lament dealing with enterprise architects, you're probably rolling your eyes on that one. Yeah, it depends. I I would say again back to the simplicity of the platform, um how easy it is as a single platform and all self-contained to to deploy. [snorts] It actually opens it up to a wider partner audience because it doesn't require as many resources to be able to do it.
I would say is there ideal traits or ideal resources that you'd want to have and bring to bear? I feel like those in my experience already exist in those partner landscapes in what they're doing and how they're interacting with the agency. And to clarify, I think typically you would think of uh a policy enforcement point like Netscope as being a security tool. We don't see that, right? It's increasingly also being brought through partners that are dealing with the networking team, right? the networking team in many agencies are understanding there is a paradigm shift there that the agencies don't necessarily own the network or at least part of the network especially as you're going through a tick 3 model direct to cloud and so there's a more of a desire on the network side to have a tool that can give them insight into what that traffic looks like what the performance looks like from real user data on the endpoint all the way through to the service and back as well as being able to uh still satisfy perhaps a complete pcap dump of data from the cloud environment which is something that's unique to Netscope in what we call cloudtap.
So I do see a rapid expansion of interest from the networking team. And so from a partner perspective, I feel like those are the two areas that we typically engage and they already are, at least the partners I deal with are already pretty sharp in those two areas. >> Thanks so much for digging into that, Mark. I'd love to get a little bit more granular there and talk about maybe a success story that you can tell me about in which Netscope and a partner closed a deal or helped a customer in the federal government together.
I know this might be a little tricky considering some of those security standards and we might not be able to name specifics, but what can you tell me? >> There was an effort to look at reducing dependency on leased lines. So um NLS lines can be fairly costly in in the fed space. Um those also can lead to constrained pipes to satellite offices. And in this case there was an initiative to look at well how do we understand or how can we remove that dependency using a couple of different capabilities outside of the platform.
But let's first implement in a way that gives us visibility into that traffic before we start down the path of removing that. And in that effort, there was discovery around an application that was antiquated, had not been uh modernized, which I would like to think of anyone in the partner space and fed space that would hear this that they're definitely nodding and understanding. That is something that you have to deal with all the time. And I would say in any of these sassy implementations, that's going to be one of the biggest things, the challenges to overcome.
But in this case, it was discovered that that application actually was a large contributor to the bandwidth issues in those um lease lines, those pipes to the satellite offices. You had a lot of traveling workforce that were on the road quite a bit and when they would come back to the satellite office because that [snorts] pipe was used for everything, all the updates and anything that they needed to get plus this replication from this application would just bog down the network.
And so it was easy to quickly turn up the zerorust network access aspect of the platform to prove out offloading that application's traffic through a zero trust network access model would immediately have an impact on the performance of other application traffic and it was a uh immediate success. So there was an immediate ROI on the application traffic. Um there was a a business process model set up from that on how to create a repeating pattern on ideal applications for this model to um offload them.
And I think there were probably five applications in 6 months that were then pulled off which removed the strain on those lease lines and gave us time for you know addressing the longer term goal of that. >> Beautifully put and a very interesting story that you shared with me. Thank you for that. So Mark, looking ahead, where do you see the biggest growth opportunities for partners serving federal customers as the government continues its zero trust and cloud first journey?
And how can Netscope help them achieve those goals? >> Well, there's there's quite a bit going on right now. I think, you know, and again, from my experience as a Fed, things usually reach um a certain peak of interest in the federal space at which point the floodgates open. And I think that's where we're at from a secure access service edge model. Um I think there are several factors driving that like AI. There is a true inflection point in the federal space where suddenly work needs to be done.
And I think if you look at direct to cloud, if you look at zerorust architecture implementation, you look at AI services, the fed space now gets that and understands the benefit in those areas. And when that happens, I've seen it with cloud first 10 years ago, that things really start moving quickly. And I think that hurry up and wait and then catch up. You can get ahead of with a platform like Netscope. You can help an agency safely enable AI. You can look at the full line and interaction with data, right?
Netcope has a a DSPM product line as well. So you're talking about from user all the way to data source. These are the things that the federal space is going to be I think investing in and looking to implement in the near term. So those kind of things um are where I think a partner can really add a lot of benefit to the security strategy and understanding current risk, how you can implement, how you can manage against, you know, these areas that are growing um daily in their use and understanding of their use in the federal space. >> Well, Mark, one more question before I let you go today.
For those interested in learning more and even getting started as a Netscope partner, where can they go? >> I would give a shout out to the marketing team. Our Netscope site is fantastic. There's a lot of great resources out there, but more specifically from a partners' perspective. Partners.netcope.com is the partner login portal, but it also has great overviews of the Netscope partner program and outlines of some of the capabilities and use cases I've talked about today.
Fantastic, Mark. Thank you so much for your time today. >> Thank you. >> And thanks to you at home for watching. For more episodes of Partner POV, check out channelinsider.com. Once again, I'm Katie Bavoso and I'll see you next time.
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