Consolidated Network Security Infrastructure

Evidence and data. As part of the multiyear shift to a Netskope SSE environment, interviewees discussed how their organizations were able to retire global communications hubs and associated security devices. This resulted in significant reductions in their organizations’ IT capex spending; it also lowered opex spending by limiting the level of internal expertise needed to maintain their legacy infrastructure. Interviewees detailed cost savings related to:

• Decommissioning legacy data centers, physical equipment, and hardware. Shifting to an SSE environment allowed interviewees’ organizations to eliminate the complexity of their legacy physical environments and capitalize on cloud-related benefits.
  
  The enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry reported that their organization’s Netskope SSE solution allowed it to avoid over $10 million in spend by decommissioning legacy solutions. Their organization sunset legacy DLP tools, SWG technology, firewalls, and related hardware and circuitry. They told Forrester: “[With Netskope SSE], we actually can just use Netskope’s virtual overlay, put connectors in these cloud environments, and get rid of those 13 hubs, which is a huge part of our cost savings analysis.”
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry said that their organization eliminated 30 firewalls and consolidated switching ports from 1,800 to less than 500 across the enterprise by using Netskope SSE. The interviewee described how this transformed their hybrid and remote work delivery model while reducing costs: “Securing my cloud applications with Netskope SSE [means] I don’t have these on-premises applications, so I don’t need that switching. We’re eliminating 100% of our remote-office/branch-office solutions from [our former vendor], which makes up half of my overall [virtualization] costs for corporate IT. We actually eliminated firewalls at all our offices and routed that [traffic] to our data centers to be processed. Now, any non-Netskope client could be an on-premises ad server.”
• Internal and external labor savings on equipment management, support, and maintenance. By eliminating a large amount of their physical technology environments, interviewees said their organizations were able to avoid the costs and efforts of standing up, running, and supporting a physical networking footprint. The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry estimated that their organization avoided $250,000 annually in vendor maintenance contracts for firewalls, $100,000 annually in vendor service agreements for servers and switching, and 1.5 FTEs dedicated to vendor and solution management. They specified: “I can rip out a [legacy server] chassis and save $100,000 a year on maintenance. Those are significant savings that I had never even thought of before going through this process.”
• Additional efficiencies associated with infrastructure modernization. By digitally transforming their network security technologies, interviewees said their organizations were also modernizing their purchasing processes. In doing so, interviewees discovered new cost-cutting opportunities.
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry shared that the modernization process opened their mind to new possibilities for value that they hadn’t been able to consider with legacy solutions. They explained: “The thing that really amazes me is I’m finding cost savings where I [would never have expected] to find them. … I’ve got a better security solution, but we’re not even looking at those as our benefits still. We’re still overwhelmed by the initial benefits of [replacing] the traditional products that we’ve been using in the past.”
  
  The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry told Forrester that consolidating cloud infrastructure purchases with their organization’s cloud hosting provider opened up new discounts: “We bought [Netskope SSE] through [our cloud hosting partner]. This increased our spending commitment, which gave us additional savings.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• It dedicates 0.3% of its $12.5 billion in annual revenues to networking spend in the prior environment, with 1.5 FTEs’ labor dedicated to managing a multitude of legacy network security vendors.
• With Netskope SSE, the composite reduces networking costs by 10%.
• In Year 1, 25% of the composite organization’s users are supported by Netskope SSE; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 90% in Year 3.
• Over three years, this eliminates over $7 million in spending on legacy hardware infrastructure and avoids nearly 5,000 hours of internal labor dedicated solely to managing multiple legacy vendors’ solutions.
• The fully burdened hourly rate for a network and security operations FTE is $58.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. The following factors may impact this benefit:

• The number of users and apps supported by Netskope SSE.
• The total revenue, percentage of revenue spent on networking, and internal labor dedicated to managing networking vendors in the prior environment.
• The extent to which organizations relied on multiple network security vendors before and the decommission rate for consolidating legacy hardware and infrastructure with Netskope SSE.
• Network and security operations FTE salaries and the skill sets available.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $5.4 million.

Improved Availability

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that their organizations increasingly benefited from improved network performance and availability as more of their users were onboarded to Netskope SSE. This meant that revenue-generating systems were more readily available to customers, enhancing profit retention compared with their prior environments. Better uptime also ensured the availability of critical systems that internal end users relied on to be productive in their work. Interviewees described how Netskope SSE helped their organizations:

• Improve network availability and performance. While prior availability metrics varied, all interviewees noted that their organizations were able to reduce the number of hours during which network services were effectively offline. The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry reported that their organization was able to ameliorate the chronic downtime issues that plagued its poorly configured prior networking environment. This resulted in up to a 10% increase in uptime for the organization’s core network services. The interviewee told Forrester: “Before, we were below 90% [availability] without a doubt. ... Now, we are probably around 3 Sigma [99.73%].”
• Mitigate outages and downtime impacts. Netskope’s agent-based solution also reduced the impacts of downtime incidents across the organization. The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry said: “When we went with Netskope, we went with an agent solution, so if something went down, it was only one person [instead of] half of the company. … But the best part is that we have a good DLP system set up now, we have good visibility into what our end users are using, and the uptime is fantastic.”
• Reduce latency. Interviewees discussed how Netskope SSE permitted faster connection speeds across vast regions compared with legacy network solutions, courtesy of Netskope’s widely distributed NewEdge PoPs and robust fiber network.
  
  The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry said that their organization validated a network performance study proving that Netskope clocked lower latencies than other SSE vendors. This was especially true for farther reaches of their organizational footprint: “With Netskope [deployed in] the Asia Pacific and Latin America [regions], we are going to see better than a 10% performance [improvement] due to their combination of fiber and usage of the cloud networks that they utilize. … We probably have 1,000 private accounts and some public internet between [three cloud hosting partners]. I’m really looking forward to the improvement in performance there, too.”
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry reported that their organization did not have any availability issues in the Netskope SSE environment: “We don’t have any problems, even when the undersea cable goes out in South Africa. … We’ve not had a single complaint about traffic degradation. While there is traffic backhauling for certain applications, there’s been no impact to our business [or] end users.”
• Improve productivity tied to network performance. Interviewees also discussed how the performance improvements with Netskope SSE described above reduced the time it took for users to access network services, data, and applications. This resulted in notable improvements in productivity and time to value, especially for developer resources. The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry noted that Netskope SSE’s network distribution improved their organization’s latency to the cloud and that this would have a positive impact on users across the organization and yield valuable productivity improvements for developers. The interviewee said: “The ability [for developers] to connect more directly to a lot of cloud environments is going to help [their productivity]. They’re not developing over the internet into a [public cloud-hosted] environment, they’re connecting to it privately. We’re going to very much improve the speed at which they can get to and write in post-code as they innovate and deploy. … [Now] you can reach anywhere in the world in under a second for the most part.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Each year in the prior environment, the composite sees an average of 24 hours of unplanned downtime due to network outages or severe performance degradation; $1.4 million in revenue loss for each hour of unplanned downtime; and 30,000 (or 50% of) FTEs impacted during any given outage.
• Netskope SSE reduces unplanned downtime by 15% for the composite organization over the three-year period. This decreases the total unplanned downtime across the entire organization by nearly 7 hours each year.
• In Year 1, 25% of the composite organization’s users are supported by Netskope SSE; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 90% in Year 3.
• The composite organization has an operating margin of 11%.
• The average fully burdened hourly rate for an end user is $44.
• End users are able to recapture 25% of the hours that would have otherwise been lost to downtime issues.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. The following factors may impact this benefit:

• The number of users supported by Netskope SSE.
• The total annual hours of unplanned downtime that an organization experiences due to network outages or severe performance degradation in its prior environment.
• The average revenue at risk per hour of unplanned downtime and the corresponding level of redundancy built into network services.
• A company’s operating margin.
• End users’ average salaries and skill sets as well as the likelihood that unplanned downtime in the prior environment impacted their workloads.
• The rate at which resources can recapture lost productivity.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.4 million.

Increased Network And Security Operations Effectiveness

Evidence and data. Shifting to Netskope SSE allowed interviewees’ organizations to automate and even avoid processes they formerly needed to maintain secure and effective infrastructure. In general, interviewees described a more streamlined operational environment that needed fewer resources for proactive environment management and reactive incident resolution.

• The head of security engineering in the hospitality industry estimated that Netskope SSE allowed its security resources to be 30% to 35% more productive. This improvement permitted their organization to allocate a considerable number of resources to higher-value data security engineering activities, further improving their organization’s post-breach security posture. The interviewee said: “I’m just very impressed by the visibility we have in users’ activity for cloud apps and websites through this tool. … It provides us [with] the built-in capability to analyze data and build [and share] our own dashboards.”
• The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry pointed out ways in which the Netskope environment improved the effectiveness of their organization’s networking security efforts. They said: “Besides showing us all the vulnerabilities and all the issues that we didn’t know about, we also got to reduce [our] staffing footprint. … We don’t have to manage anything from Netskope right now.”

Interviewees also detailed several ways in which Netskope SSE’s capabilities and automated workflows contributed to:

• Streamlining networking operations. Interviewees outlined how Netskope SSE’s networking-related automations reduced manual operations compared with their prior environments.
  
  The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry pointed to efficiencies inherent in the distribution of Netskope’s NewEdge PoPs, which lowered the amount of networking, engineering, and maintenance required to support key business activities like geopinning. They said: “Netskope had PoPs in every single country where we do business, which meant we did not have to reverse engineer or augment the infrastructure for Netskope. … [Without it], we would have to do a lot of engineering to make sure that we’re getting that geopinned local IP address.”
  
  The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry said that Netskope SSE helped their organization optimize its VDI deployments for new hires, which could range up to 50 per week. Rather than going through on-premises infrastructure, their organization routed all deployments through the Netskope environment with Netskope SSE’s Management Plane to ensure proper configuration. The interviewee said: “We can provision regular end users much faster with Netskope. It builds these Netskope tunnels, [giving us] the ability to spin up [VDI deployments] quickly. It does the magic ahead of time, and it doesn’t take any manual intervention to set up, which has saved us a lot of time.”
• Improving the productivity of security operations. Interviewees reported on Netskope SSE’s capabilities to automate workflows, reducing the administrative burden for several mission-critical security processes like checking compliance, pushing out patch updates, and investigating false positives. The head of security engineering in the hospitality industry shared that their organization reduced false positives and automated compliance checking with Netskope SSE. It also found significant value in Netskope’s automated processes for patch updates, which reduced engineering labor by more than 75% and decreased the patch SLA from weeks to effectively on-demand. In their organization’s prior environment, these quarterly processes necessitated lengthy four- to six-week SLAs and considerable labor from several different types of resources to develop, properly test, and roll out patches to end users and customers. The interviewee told Forrester: “[Now] we can do it through the Netskope console, so it’s seamless, it’s easy. We get the update and then we test it out on a few devices, and then we just push it out. ... We have savings in terms of the [overall length of] time it takes to push [the patch] out, and then also the time spent by the engineers has reduced.”
• Gaining labor efficiencies due to fewer standing issues and less rework. With tightly calibrated conditions in Netskope SSE environments, interviewees reported that their organizations were able to reap further labor efficiencies. The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry said that Netskope SSE reduced the number of lingering issues preoccupying networking and security teams by over 80%: “[We have a] standing issue list of 30 or 40 issues that we would carry over week to week, and now the issue list is much more manageable. It’s usually around five.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• It dedicates 30 internal resources to network and security operations.
• In Year 1, 25% of the composite organization’s users are supported by Netskope SSE; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 90% in Year 3.
• The composite increases network and security operations effectiveness in the Netskope SSE environment by 30% compared with the prior environment.
• The average fully burdened annual salary for a network and security operations resource is $121,000.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. The following factors may impact this benefit:

• The number of users supported by Netskope SSE.
• An organization’s security culture and maturity.
• Networking and security operations requirements prior to Netskope.
• The number of severe cloud security incidents requiring manual investigation.
• Network and security operations FTE salaries and the skill sets available.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.5 million.

Avoided Costs Of A Material Breach

Evidence and data. Three of the four interviewees discussed external and identity-based attacks on their organizations in their prior environments. These attacks resulted in material data breaches, causing significant, cascading damages to their organizations and prompting their investments in Netskope SSE. Interviewees listed several areas in which Netskope SSE helped reduce their risk exposure and avoid breach-related costs, including:

• A reduced risk of malware infection, data loss, and other threats. The interviewees said that Netskope SSE made their organizations more resilient to external threats — for example, by integrating it with other security solutions to share threat intelligence and export logs. As a result, the interviewees reported that their organizations eliminated and/or mitigated several security risks while lowering the costly impacts of a potential breach.
  
  The head of security engineering in the hospitality industry described how their organization’s SSE configuration vastly improved its security posture from its prior environment: “We have a bidirectional sharing with our EDR for malware, so either of the tools detects it and it blocks it right away. … In the SaaS environment [of] cloud apps and websites, I would say we’re about 90% more protected [from] malware. For data loss, we are about 70% [more] protected.”
  
  The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry said: “I would definitely say that the risk has been lowered mainly because we’re not fighting fires all the time and we can concentrate on vulnerabilities and actual work instead of fighting the downtime. [Security and networking teams are] both plugged into each other’s systems rather well.”
• Improved visibility with better context. Interviewees said Netskope SSE enhanced their insight into their technology systems, uncovering serious security gaps that had previously gone unnoticed. They explained how addressing these gaps further reduced the risk of a material breach for their organizations.
  
  The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry said: “Netskope SSE showed us all these issues that we didn’t really know we had. We found systems on the internet that weren’t going through our security controls … we were shocked [and] we fixed. ... It was avoiding all our antivirus, malware, and data loss protection controls. Luckily, that stuff is pretty much all closed down right now.”
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry estimated that Netskope SSE was 50% better at providing insightful contextual data than other solutions tested. They explained: “The only visibility we had before was based on [if] someone was on the VPN or going through our firewalls. Now we have insight 24x7x365 on every device.”
• Stronger security controls to block risky user behavior. Interviewees said that Netskope SSE allowed their teams to block user access to malicious websites, detect risky activities, and mitigate insider and data exfiltration risks.
  
  The head of security engineering in the hospitality industry said that the Netskope SSE configuration allowed their security resources to proactively secure their organization in ways that weren’t possible in the prior environment: “[Now security operations resources] are able to immediately request and block websites or URLs that they find to be malicious. They are able to detect anomalous or risky user activity that could cause harm to [the company].”
  
  The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry said their organization valued Netskope’s more granular analysis of a larger number of sites than other SSE solutions their organization considered: “Netskope had more of a risk-scoring advantage. They have a larger inventory of SaaS providers or other internet sites that they can rank.”
• Measurable reductions in security incident volumes and average resolution times. Interviewees quantified how the security improvements noted above helped reduce the frequency and number of security incidents caused by external and identity-based attacks.
  
  The head of security engineering in the hospitality industry believed that Netskope SSE may have decreased security incidents by 10%, saying: “It has gone down because we have protective controls in place, so we’re stopping the activity from happening, which has brought the incident rates down.” The interviewee also said their organization reduced the total time and effort needed to detect, investigate, and remediate security incidents.
  
  The head of security engineering in the hospitality industry discussed how unplanned downtime resulted in lengthy and cascading impacts: “Depending on the application, it could be in thousands [of dollars for] both end users [employees] and customers [impacted. …To get back online,] it could take anywhere from a couple of hours to two to three days.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• In the prior environment, the composite organization has an 89% likelihood of experiencing one or more breaches per year; this is held flat year over year for the purpose of this analysis. Furthermore, 49% of these breaches are attributable to external attacks. The mean cumulative cost of data breaches in the prior environment is $6.6 million. Forrester Research estimates that 70% of breaches are addressable with Netskope SSE.³
• For the composite, these combined factors yield $1.9 million of annualized risk.
• With Netskope SSE, the composite reduces the likelihood of a severe data breach caused by an external attack by 80%.
• In Year 1, 25% of the composite organization’s users are supported by Netskope SSE; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 90% in Year 3.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. The following factors may impact this benefit:

• The number of users supported by Netskope SSE.
• An organization’s security culture and maturity.
• The likelihood and associated costs of security breaches each year.
• The risk reduction resulting from Netskope SSE’s improved visibility and stronger security controls.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.0 million.

Streamlined Remote Experience

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that the Netskope SSE environment allowed their organizations to eliminate inefficient security procedures while reducing latency-induced friction. This helped them achieve various benefits, including:

• Streamlined approaches to securing remote connectivity. Interviewees described how Netskope SSE allowed their organizations to rearchitect their approach to securing remote user access to internet-facing apps. This improved end users’ overall experience and reduced the number of issues they needed to troubleshoot compared with their legacy VPN solutions.
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry noted that half of their organization needed secure remote access to data stored on-premises at any given time, but the legacy VPN solution entailed a cumbersome user workflow: “It probably took about a minute for all of these processes to occur. Users were starting the client, typing in a username and password, waiting for a dual-factor authentication token, going to their mobile device, getting their token, typing that in, and waiting for the final connection. [Now Netskope SSE has] zero impact on the end user.”
  
  The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry indicated that their remote workforce benefited from Netskope SSE’s consolidated infrastructure. The streamlined VPN was less of a nuisance than the bulkier, user-driven procedures in the prior environment: “For VPN, we had more firewalls [than with Netskope SSE], so now you can connect to other markets much, much faster. [And now the] Netskope network can get us into many more cloud environments faster.”
• New delivery models. Interviewees also discussed ways in which Netskope enabled new delivery models. These transformative approaches helped streamline, improve, and innovate the remote and hybrid work experience.
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry said consolidating their organization’s network security infrastructure with Netskope SSE enabled it to transform to a highly agile and secure remote delivery model. This new approach enhanced security, the end-user experience, and overall perceptions of the IT team: “Because 100% of my fleet is now protected, I have literally eliminated networks in my offices. I’ve gone to a ‘[coffee shop]’ model in our offices where I’ve probably eliminated thousands of ports of network switching and just gone wireless. … Our end-user partners in this were very happy we eliminated that and could see the value that IT was delivering to the organization.”
  
  The vice president of digital experience in the financial services industry shared that Netskope SSE expanded the range of apps capable of secure, remote, mobile access: “Now we are able to offer many more applications via mobility [through] phones and iPads than we could before. We’re giving them access to applications they never had because Netskope gives me [newfound] visibility [that I need] into the traffic.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Half of the composite organization’s 60,000 end users require secure, remote access to corporate private apps, data, and services located in the cloud.
• In the prior environment, the legacy VPN requires remote end users to actively engage in login and authentication procedures. These steps amount to 1 minute per end user per day solely dedicated to managing clunky VPN logins. Over a year, these individual logins total 250 minutes of wasted time per resource — or 125,000 total hours across all remote user login attempts annually.
• With Netskope SSE, the composite reduces the amount of time it takes for end users to access apps supported by Netskope by 50%.
• End users are able to recapture 25% of the hours that would have otherwise been lost to lengthy VPN boot-up procedures.
• The average fully burdened hourly rate for an end user is $44.
• In Year 1, 25% of the composite organization’s users are supported by Netskope SSE; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 90% in Year 3.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. The following factors may impact this benefit:

• The number of users supported by Netskope SSE and the portion of users that need secure, remote access to corporate apps.
• The prevalence of active end-user login steps for legacy VPN solutions.
• Network and end-user FTE salaries and the skill sets available.
• The rate at which resources can recapture lost productivity.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $943,000.

Accelerated Time To Value For Mergers And Acquisitions

Evidence and data. Interviewees shared how Netskope SSE helped their organizations reduce costly efforts surrounding merger and acquisition (M&A) workflows by:

• Streamlining M&A labor efforts. Interviewees noted that their organizations were able to avoid many legacy M&A efforts due to their cloud-native SSE solution. Other remaining workflows were shortened and enhanced.
  
  The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry said that their organization had experienced huge savings from its M&A efforts with Netskope SSE. They estimated that Netskope contributed up to $100,000 annually in post-merger time savings. They attributed this to the platform’s ability to better establish protected connections to child company networks and to provide accelerated access to the parent company’s critical internal applications and whitelisted IP space.
  
  The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry shared how their organization accelerated the time to value for M&A with Netskope SSE: “It’s [from] avoided labor cost, making money faster, [and from] the integration [of] collaboration platforms [so] we can all work together better. … That quickness definitely saves us money, makes us money, and avoids possible issues. The longer [the companies] are not on our systems, the longer they’re on systems that are vulnerable to everything.”
• Enhancing app discovery capabilities. The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry highlighted how Netskope SSE’s AppDiscovery added valuable functionality to the organization’s M&A use case: “[AppDiscovery] is helping us with the process of centralizing a lot of applications now. The capability for us [to use it with M&As] to discover applications and start working on consolidating the common platforms was a huge benefit.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite acquires and merges with two new companies in Year 1, three new companies in Year 2, and four new companies in Year 3.
• In the prior environment, the composite needs to devote 10,000 hours per company to securely onboarding an acquired company.
• With Netskope SSE, the composite cuts the number of hours needed to onboard a new company to corporate services in half, avoiding more than 30,000 hours of networking and security operations labor over three years.
• In Year 1, 25% of the composite organization’s users are supported by Netskope SSE; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 90% in Year 3.
• The fully burdened hourly rate for a network and security operations FTE is $58.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. The following factors may impact this benefit:

• The number of companies acquired throughout the investment period.
• The amount of effort required to absorb a new company in the prior environment.
• The number of users supported by Netskope SSE.
• Network and security operations FTE salaries and the skill sets available.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.3 million.

IT Help Desk Optimization

Evidence and data. Interviewees discussed how Netskope SSE helped improve network performance and availability as well as decrease the number of failure points in their infrastructure. At the same time, the remote employee experience vastly improved, requiring less end-user effort and resulting in fewer troubleshooting issues. With Netskope SSE, the interviewees said that their organizations were able to:

• Reduce networking and security support ticket volumes. Interviewees reported significant reductions in the number of tickets their teams had to resolve, as Netskope SSE had already neutralized many of the pain points that existed in their prior environments. The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry reported that their organization reduced its networking security support ticket volume by 80%, from 100 tickets a month to 20, remarking: “That has caught a tremendous amount of my desktop support that I was doing on previous hard clients and upgrades. That’s a huge one for me. I’m really happy with that.”
• Streamline ticket resolution efforts. Interviewees indicated that their organizations were able to simplify ticket resolution efforts in the Netskope SSE environment, with shorter resolution times and fewer resources involved in troubleshooting.
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry shared that their organization reduced the average time to resolve issues by 50%, dropping from 1 hour to 30 minutes.
  
  The head of security engineering in the hospitality industry mentioned that their organization integrated its logging and monitoring tool into Netskope SSE. This allowed their organization to create automated service tickets from detections or other types of activity that would prompt action from another team. By streamlining processes with automation, their organization was able to reduce errors, thereby reducing the labor involved in error correction and rework and speeding up resolution times.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• In the prior environment, the composite organization’s IT help desk fields 24,000 support tickets on SSE-related issues.
• In Year 1, 25% of the composite organization’s users are supported by Netskope SSE; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 90% in Year 3.
• With Netskope SSE, the composite reduces network and security support ticket volumes by 80%, avoiding more than 36,000 tickets over the investment period.
• Compared with the prior environment, the composite also reduces the amount of time it takes to resolve IT support tickets by 60%. The composite saves 16,000 hours of support effort as a result.
• The fully burdened hourly rate for an IT support technician is $37.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. The following factors may impact this benefit:

• The number of users supported by Netskope SSE and the number of SSE-related help desk tickets filed annually.
• The nature and severity of network and security issues fielded by the IT help desk in the prior environment, and the amount of time it took to resolve them before.
• IT support technician FTE salaries and the skill sets available.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $937,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Improved intellectual property protection and profit retention from data loss prevention. Regardless of their organizations’ breach history, interviewees discussed the growing need to signal their strong DLP controls to customers and data sharing partners. Interviewees from organizations that had experienced large, public breaches, however, indicated that their customers audited them in order to continue to do business with their organizations. Interviewees indicated that they may have risked losing business if they lacked proof of various DLP controls. The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry reflected on the measurable impacts that Netskope SSE had on revenue retention. This specifically related to their organization’s ability to meet customers’ increasingly stringent and granular DLP requirements that they were unable to meet in their prior environment. These included the ability to protect documents with certain data labels, such as their clients’ product names, from exfiltration as well as the ability to block personal emails and specific social media sites for both security and productivity purposes. The interviewee noted: “We’ve saved revenue by being able to implement the data loss prevention that [our customers] required. With [that under consideration], we are well into the black [with our Netskope investment]. Now, we are actually earning money in years two, three and four of our deal and only paying a fraction of the actual cost in year one with the ability to retain business and not lose [it].”
• Improved regulatory compliance readiness and responsiveness. Interviewees at the post-breach organizations described how Netskope made it easier to both comply with and report on the requirements of their regulators, customers, and data partners. The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry said that their organization was able to reduce the level of effort needed to satisfy regulator demands for evidence: “After our breach … we get audited a ton and we give them evidence that we’re doing the right thing, [and] then they come back with [a lot of] questions. It definitely took a long time, and I don’t know if we had the ability to give them everything that they needed. The process has been much easier of late. We can definitely show them the evidence now.”
• Greater alignment with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability goals. While several of the interviewees’ organizations had publicly stated environmental commitments, one interviewee described how their organization’s Netskope SSE deployment supported these goals. The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry said that by helping them meet their organization’s sustainability goals, Netskope SSE was providing their organization with several sustainability-related business advantages. The interviewee mentioned that decommissioning their organization’s networking equipment over the investment period would allow it to reduce hardware and associated power, cooling, and other environmental costs for the SSE technology. The interviewee said that the SD-WAN solution would draw less power than their larger legacy firewalls. “We’re in the process right now of moving everything off-prem into the cloud to have [a] better, more responsible environmental [impact].”⁴ Finally, the interviewee also suggested that boosting their organization’s ability to meet its sustainability targets helped substantiate their organization’s sustainability messaging; they thought that this could better align their organization with like-minded customers, helping them retain customer relationships that they wouldn’t have been able to safeguard with their legacy solutions.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Netskope SSE and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Faster time to value. Some interviewees compared the time-to-value benefits their organizations achieved with their Netskope SSE solution to the time it took to deliver in their prior, hardware-driven technology environments.
  
  The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry said that shifting to and operating on the Netskope SSE was much faster than with traditional networking: “[It’s] tremendously faster. Let’s take firewalls. We buy the hardware and wait for its hardware to ship, [which] takes forever. Now for VPN access, we’re on to the ZTNA portion [of SSE]. [Our resource in Brazil] could implement a global ZTNA solution with 5,000% more points of presence. It’s way faster than shipping hardware everywhere, and we are getting astronomically better performance.”
  
  The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry discussed how their organization was strengthening its ability to address insider threats while improving SLAs for opening up sites safely. They noted: “Netskope has a rating on every site, [with] some sites that … it won’t let [users] go to. … The process for opening up sites safely for [the prior vendor] was usually a couple of days. The Netskope SLA is less than 24 hours, and we can actually make it happen a little faster if we need to.”
• Further platform extensibility. In addition to the original business objectives for Netskope, interviewees pointed out that their organizations discovered many new use cases for platform extension that arose as the Netskope SSE solution was adopted across the organization.
  
  The VP of infrastructure in the technology industry talked about how their organization intended to lean into the Netskope One SSE platform roadmap as it looked to expand the benefits it received from the solution. “[Netskope has] been very easy to work with on the future enhancements that we request. … We have big plans to extend and utilize Netskope SSE and integrate it into more areas of the business.”
  
  The VP of digital experience in the financial services industry mentioned that their organization was exploring new opportunities with mobile enablement as a result of its shift to Netskope SSE: “Part of our Netskope licenses included licensing for mobility, [so] we are able to offer many more applications now via mobility than we were before. We’ve stepped up our mobility game [with] phones and iPads. We’re giving a lot of folks access to applications they never had access to because Netskope gives me visibility into the traffic that we never had before.”
  
  The same interviewee also discussed how their financial services organization was further extending its Netskope One SSE platform to safeguard their innovations with AI. They said: “We’re doing a lot of AI work now and offering [a major AI chatbot] to thousands of our end users, and that’s scary for the kind of security we do. But Netskope has some really good, specific AI tools in their platform, so we were able to prove that we had data exfiltration protection not just in that AI workspace but in this other new disruptive technology.”
• Broader/extended secure access service edge (SASE) ecosystem benefits. While this study focuses on the business value of Netskope SSE, interviewees whose organizations also deployed Netskope’s SD-WAN solution mentioned additional ecosystem benefits. The senior enterprise architecture manager in the advertising industry said that connecting their Netskope SSE solution to their broader SD-WAN solution with Netskope allowed their organization to reduce its connectivity costs: “Our cost per megabit is well under what other companies have to begin with. This [improved connectivity] is going to make it even lower.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).