The Total Economic Impact™ Of Netskope SSE

As modern enterprises shift to the cloud, they must secure access to corporate applications while protecting users and apps from the malicious internet. To do so, networking and security professionals are implementing security service edge (SSE) solutions in growing numbers instead of traditional secure web gateways, firewalls, and VPNs. SSE solutions inspect egress traffic from remote users, buildings, vehicles, or similar remote edge locations, allowing firms to provide Zero Trust access to the web, software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and public-facing enterprise apps, as well as private applications and resources to ensure data loss prevention and threat protection for any user, device, or location.¹

The Netskope One platform features a comprehensive, converged SSE solution that enables organizations with hybrid cloud environments to consolidate and secure access to the web, cloud services, and private apps from any location. The Netskope One platform for SSE offers remote workers secure web and cloud access while allowing network and security teams to enact data loss prevention controls; protect, detect, and mitigate threats; and enforce corporate policies, compliance regulations, and best practices. Unique to Netskope is the NewEdge private network, which allows Netskope to optimize application traffic across and through multiple security services. NewEdge helps reduce the performance issues often encountered with SaaS-based security solutions.

Netskope commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Netskope SSE.² The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Netskope SSE on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four representatives with experience using Netskope SSE. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a multibillion-dollar firm with 60,000 employees (full-time equivalents [FTEs]) worldwide, half of whom require remote access to private corporate apps.

Interviewees said that prior to using Netskope SSE, their organizations faced significant challenges as a result of their outdated and inadequate legacy networking and security environments, including major data breaches marked by data loss. Regular issues with latency and network performance impacted the availability of critical customer- and user-facing apps. Interviewees lamented that these network outages and degradations caused revenue loss as well as unplanned employee downtime — dual blows to their organizations’ profitability. Networking and security staff productivity was impeded by outages, long lists of standing issues, and large volumes of troubleshooting tickets from disgruntled remote workers.

After the investment in Netskope SSE, the interviewees’ organizations were able to consolidate network security infrastructure, decommissioning legacy data centers, physical equipment, and hardware in the process and enabling internal and external labor savings on vendor management, support, and equipment maintenance. Interviewees also highlighted other key results from the investment: They streamlined operations for general networking efforts as well as those related to merger and acquisitions activity; saw an increase in security operations effectiveness; reduced the risk of malware infection, data exfiltration, and other threats; saw improved visibility into, better context for, and stronger security controls to block risky user behavior; and made measurable reductions in security incident volumes and average resolution times.

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

• Infrastructure consolidation savings of 10%. The composite consolidates its network security infrastructure on Netskope SSE, permitting it to sunset legacy data centers, physical equipment, and legacy hardware and software solutions. In the process, it avoids internal and external management, support, and maintenance costs and unlocks additional discounts. These savings total $5.4 million for the composite.
• A 15% reduction in unplanned downtime. The composite credits Netskope SSE with a significant reduction in outage frequency as well as with correlated improvements in network availability and performance. The composite is able to achieve better availability metrics and latency speeds while mitigating the impacts of outages and downtime on revenue operations and staff productivity. Together, the retained profits and recaptured end-user efficiencies are worth $2.4 million.
• Regaining more than 35,000 hours of networking and security operations effort. With Netskope SSE, the composite automates and streamlines numerous networking processes. Security teams gain visibility while troubleshooting, helping reduce the mean time to resolve (MTTR) incidents. These and other network and security operations improvements reattribute nearly 400 hours of effort per resource to more productive tasks. Across all networking and security resources, these savings are valued at $1.5 million.
• An 80% reduction in the risk of a severe breach caused by an external attack. The composite organization reduces its risk profile by improving its protection against malware and tightening its data loss prevention (DLP) controls with Netskope SSE. Better visibility into and context for risky user behaviors coupled with stronger security controls to block such behaviors lower security incident volumes and accelerate breach resolution times. With Netskope SSE, the composite avoids $2.0 million in annualized material breach costs.
• Nearly 30,000 hours of remote user effort avoided across the organization. By rearchitecting its approach to secure internet access, the composite organization eliminates the need for end users to continually engage in time-consuming VPN processes. Now, each remote employee can immediately boot up their devices with no time delay. While each employee only saves minutes per day by avoiding a complex process logging into the VPN, these incremental time savings add up to $943,000 in recouped end-user productivity across the organization.
• A 50% reduction in integration costs associated with merger & acquisitions (M&A). The composite acquires and merges with nine new companies throughout the investment period; it reduces the onboarding effort by half with Netskope SSE. Over three years, these labor savings shorten the onboarding period and improve M&A profitability by $1.3 million.
• An 80% reduction in help desk volumes and 60% reduction in MTTR. With Netskope SSE, the composite gains improved visibility into the user environment, reduces network and security support ticket volumes, and streamlines support processes. These help the organization avoid more than 30,000 hours of network and security troubleshooting efforts over the investment period. The value to the composite of this IT help desk optimization is $937,000.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• Improved intellectual property protection and profit retention from data loss prevention.
• Improved regulatory compliance readiness and responsiveness.
• Greater alignment with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability goals.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

• Netskope SSE licensing totaling $6.7 million. The composite implements Netskope SSE with dedicated egress IP addresses, cloud access security broker (CASB), Next Generation Secure Web Gateway (NG-SWG), firewall as a service (FWaaS), remote browser isolation (RBI), digital experience management (DEM), and Zero Trust network access (ZTNA). It also builds out capabilities for DLP, threat protection, and user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA) and engages Premium Plus Support in all three years of the investment. The number of apps, seats, and users supported by the various solution components drive the composite’s licensing costs.
• Implementation and training costs amounting to $168,000. The composite dedicates six internal resources to a three-month initial implementation effort for Netskope SSE. It trains more than 60 resources over the three-year period in keeping with the user adoption curve.
• Platform management costs of $43,000. The composite has three resources partially dedicated to Netskope SSE platform management. After the solution reaches a steady state, the platform requires no more than 3 hours of platform management per resource per week.

The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $14.48 million over three years versus costs of $6.93 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $7.55 million and an ROI of 109%.

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Appendix A: Endnotes