Netskope boosts digital experience monitoring with Kadiska buy

Netskope this week acquired digital experience monitoring firm Kadiska in a move that the SASE provider says will expand Netskope’s DEM capabilities for networking and infrastructure professionals who need greater visibility across their SD-WAN, secure service edge, and cloud environments.

“The founding vision of Kadiska matches uncannily well with the Netskope platform vision. Both technologies have been built to recognize the new world where data, users, cloud infrastructure, and applications are all dispersed, leaving blind spots and challenges for organizations seeking to control and optimize experience and security,” said Sanjay Beri, CEO and co-founder of Netskope said in a statement. “We already share some very large global customers and seeing the appetite for integration—bringing together the capabilities of both companies—really proved to use the rationale for this acquisition.”

France-based Kadiska, founded in 2020, delivers DEM technology that provides visibility into the end-user experience across SaaS and cloud applications. The Santa Clara-based Netskope plans to integrate Kadiska technologies into its Netskope Proactive DEM offering. Kadiska’s real-user experience and end-to-end connectivity monitoring capabilities, which are complementary to Netskope’s existing DEM tools, extend to monitoring browsers, mobile devices, web and cloud applications, as well as public and cloud networks.

Netskope says the monitoring technology will also augment its secure access service edge (SASE) platform to enable customers to deliver secure, reliable digital experiences across complex hybrid cloud environments. Coined by Gartner in 2019, SASE refers to a network architecture that combines SD-WAN with a suite of security services—which can include encryption, multifactor authentication, data leak prevention, firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), secure Web gateway (SWG), and zero trust network access (ZTNA)—into a unified cloud service.

“Enterprises want to create the best, secure experiences for their hybrid work environments. Netskope has been striving to deliver on this experience with its SASE Platform built on NewEdge infrastructure and manage it with Netskope Proactive DEM,” says Naveen Palavalli, vice president of product strategy at Netskope. “The addition of Kadiska to this vision will greatly enhance and accelerate our capabilities. This new set of capabilities is a major differentiator for us.”

The acquisition furthers Netskope’s efforts to provide an all-in-one SASE platform for customers. According to Gartner, by 2025 one-third of new SASE deployments will be based on a single-vendor SASE offering, up from 10% in 2022. Also, by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services, and private application access using a SASE/security service edge (SSE) architecture, up from 20% in 2020, Gartner says.

“What is needed is an identity-aware and context-aware network and security access fabric that connects users, devices, and locations everywhere to the enterprise’s digital resources anywhere,” reads the Gartner report, Market Guide for Single-Vendor SASE. “Delivering this anywhere, anytime access to any user, device, or location requires a cloud-centric SASE capability.”

Becoming a single-vendor SASE provider is driving security vendors to acquire network monitoring capabilities and networking vendors to acquire more security capabilities. According to a recent IDC survey, 68% of 830 respondents said they would like to use the same vendor for their SD-WAN and security/SASE solution.

“Kadiska’s capabilities also support the needs that go beyond security personnel. They’re really geared toward supporting networking and infrastructure personnel because the firm offers network visualization capabilities to map packet flows and workflows,” Palavalli says. “It makes it more seamless for these sets of stakeholders to have a bigger participatory role in their organizations’ SASE implementations.”

The exact timing of the product integration is yet to be determined. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.