Netskope Talks Culture of Innovation, 'One' Platform + Future of GenAI — The Somerford Podcast: Middle East

James returns, this time joined by Jonathan Mepsted, Vice President of Middle East & Africa at Netskope for a discussion on Netskope's past, present and future. 

Jonathan talks about the foundational principles shaping Netskope's enduring vision, highlighting the future applications of GenAI in the workplace and sharing his philosophy on team culture. 

🇦🇪 Find out more about Somerford in the Middle East on our website: https://www.somerfordassociates.com/somerford-middle-east/ 

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Transcript

0:04

So welcome. Welcome back to Somerford Associates’ Middle East podcast. We're here for our third episode and with me today, I have Jonathan Mepsted, from Netskope. Hi, James. who is the Vice President of Netskope across the Middle East and Africa, also formerly from the U.K. Helping scale that organisation, I'll let you do your own introductions in a second, but just a bit of context and things I think quite interesting for everyone, for the viewers and people listening in nine years in Netskope. It's a good tenure, it's a really good exposure. So not only the organisation but the technology, so really interested to dig into that a little bit more and a really strong background in terms of growing organisations and the likes of Fortinet and McAfee and other organisations that you've been at. You know, a great view and context of how CASB has grown over the years, how proxies have developed and changed - and VPNs. So a little bit technical, but we'll dig into that as well. But also really interesting about your piloting background as well. I think everyone's going to want to learn a little bit about this! That’ll be a very short conversation![Laughter] Your experience in the RAF, you know, how that might transfer and where some skills might transfer into growing hyper growth in hyperscaled organisations. But you know, maybe to start off with, you know, maybe if you could give a little bit more about yourself as people get to know you a bit, maybe about your family - a bit more personal just to get a feel for who you are and also your experiences. You know, you, you know, moved out here the same sorts of time. Yeah, we've been setting up Somerford Middle East, but obviously you came out here to expand the Netskope footprint, Global Footprint. It's been great to hear some of your experiences in doing that. Absolutely. Thank you for the introduction. That's brilliant. Yeah. So, Jonathan Mepsted, as you say, I've been at Netskope - this is very close to my 10th year at Netskope, so, my longest tenure anywhere. And I think that speaks volumes about the excitement. I still feel about the opportunity and I'll I'll get into that in a moment. But yeah, well, you're right. I've been fortunate enough to be at a number of Start-Up companies that were from the start, from very early stages where they've gone through 100 million ARR, you know, there was NetScreen back in the day, which was the first sort of basic base firewall and then Fortinet and then Imperva and then. Yes, and then. Netskope. So Netskope by far and away has been the best just in terms of the culture, the vision And what it's allowed me to actually take take as an opportunity for, for self-development, really. So yeah, I started off and there was I think I have we've just had our Kick-Off in Lisbon last week and it was quite interesting that there were very few of us left of that this sort of tenure. So I was certainly the first sales guy in Europe and I'm a, yeah, you know, back then CASB didn't even exist, It wasn't formulated as something that Gartner would come up with. But that's all very different now obviously. But it's, it has been an exciting development, just seeing how those conversations that you had earlier where you were trying to explain what Netskope was and it was about safe cloud enablement, the so what from most CISOs that we would typically be talking to, they were understanding that they were using SaaS largely, but it didn't really the risks associated with that really didn't seem to feature in their to do fixed lists, whereas now obviously it's it we're saying that, you know, the average enterprise will be using maybe 60% of the traffic rather will be SaaS or cloud based. And we know that 50% of the threats will be hidden somewhere in that. And the largest repository for that will be the big ones, you know, like OneDrive and SharePoint. So the conversations we have now with people has really evolved and it's largely that that sort of evolution has kept me fresh. So I know the UK was fantastic growing that to a very successful part of that Netskope. Working with your company (Somerford) yourselves on several big customers as they go through their digital transformation. But the opportunity was given to me to go and do something new. I was already looking after Africa, or South Africa ostensibly, but there was this sort of big ticket win that we'd got with a very large, well known customer in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia. Say no more! And it was like - how do we grow that? So I thought, well, why not? And when you look at the geopolitical sort of financial thing that had been going on just before the pandemic and then immediately after the Middle East seemed to be a really good fulcrum, a really good fulcrum in terms of the way in which the the politics and the economics of the world is going to perhaps move around. And I thought, what a great place to go and be based. I'm sure you had similar sort of things about. Absolutely. I feel very fortunate actually. You know, I spoke a little bit on our first (podcast) episodes. You know actually, this is going to be our home, for me and my family as well. But, you know, actually for the organisation that we're developing out here, we really see a long term approach to this and it's a really exciting, dynamic, entrepreneurial place and everyone is so vibrant in their views that they want to go out and be successful and help. And I'm sure you must be seeing this with all the organisations you talk to that entrepreneurial spirit, even at large corporates and large enterprises, it bleeds all the way through the organisation. Yeah, 100%, yeah. We talk a lot about growth mindset in Netskope, just trying to make sure that that's actually the pervading sort of mindset of us and how we, deal with our very trusted partners like yourselves and also our customers. But you're right, there is that growth mindset everywhere. It's the positivity is incredible, it’s infectious. It is. So I - came out here not knowing quite what to expect and was going to I was treating this very much as a project. I very much of a short term thing. I’d be here for a year, set up Netskope, get it ready to be repeatable, predictable, all those good things and then hand on. But I'm loath to give this up because I'm really I'm loving my time out here. So my wife is coming out, my my youngest son. I've got six kids. Most of them have fled the nest. And for the cynics of you out there I haven't done this purely for the tax free reasons to pay for all those kids! it helps. But yeah, my youngest one now is just finishing his GCSEs in the UK and he'll be coming out. He's just been accepted into a college here for his A-levels, so he'll be coming out in August. So that would not - we wouldn't of even entertained that, that, that sort of option unless I was enjoying it and inspired and, and yeah I'm absolutely loving the time out here so yeah. Awesome. I mean you are going to get a lot of the, “Dad, can we have the free holiday please?” that must be happening quite a bit already? Oh my word James. Yeah they’ve been out here loads and Yeah that first, that first. So I came out as you mentioned about the same time as you. Right. So October ‘22 and, and it was blissful because the weather was amazing. The weather just started to turn sort of, you know, humans can just bear it and then and yeah, we had loads and loads of the kids out, all of them have come out multiple times already. We had our first Christmas here just gone, which was incredible. Yeah. On the beach? yeah, yeah. No, my wife insisted that we wouldn't, we wouldn't, wouldn't possibly. It wouldn't make sense doing it at the apartment. So we have to go and go to a resort hotel, which we did. And that was if everyone loved it. So it just, it's - I don’t want to sound like a tourist advert, tourism advert, for the UAE, but it's it is a delightful place to be. And you can find what you want to find here. But from a business sense, as you mentioned, that entrepreneurial spirit is writ large over so many businesses, be they very large conglomerates, be they multinationals or affiliates of multinationals, or, sort of relatively small and there's this hunger for transformation, particularly in the UAE. There's this real drive to digitalisation. Interestingly, I mean, I said we look at the Middle East and most people are very, very interested or very eager to see how they can work in Saudi Arabia as well. So Netskope, we've driven ourselves to make sure that we do things properly as much as we can. And what do I mean by that? So we establish entities wherever we have feet on the street, we'll have an entity and will invest in that that country. So the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that's what we've done. We when I first went over the back, I think the beginning of ‘22, I remember leaving and having a conversation with our legal and head of HR saying we need to do it. We need to get the entity started. That process, I don’t matter how long it's going to take or how complex, we absolutely have to get that done. And and thankfully we have we've we've now got Netskope Arabia. We've got we've invested in people and infrastructure out there. And I was at LEAP We were laughing about this before we started. I was late this week and hence the reason my voice is a little croaky,(LEAP) it’s very noisy. They had moved it this year to a new location just so it can be bigger. And I love that about Saudi Arabia. It's got to be the biggest. And it worked. It was incredibly busy. My guys were saying it's taking them about four and a half hours, 5 hours to get home one evening from the traffic chaos. So it was really on a mammoth scale? Yeah. Yeah. And it just it for me, you have all walks going around to LEAP, you know, from the very young to a high course student. Actually there was one CISO, that was going along with his nine year old daughter and we had to pitch to her about what Netskope is.- That's fantastic. Was that part of the test? If you can help my nine year old daughter, understand what Netskope is! Laughingly, exactly, he said if she can understand it and pitch it to me, you've you've done well. But it goes all the way up to obviously very important people at very important places within within the kingdom. But it's it's that hunger that that thirst for for knowledge. And it does sort of tell you we've definitely made the right decision. I think we've we're here and that's there's going to be this major move to to a transformation that we can be part of. It's a real privilege. I think you’re right, it is a privilege and it's fantastic to be a part of it and it's enthuses me every day it’s why we,- apart from the blue skies. It's very nice. That’s lovely to hear, and it's been really interesting. I suppose before we get a little bit more into Netskope and make sure people want to hear different things. And I've been really interested as a business leader and someone that has run organisations for many, many years and, and for people who are watching us, what really motivates you and what is your primary driver know what's the thing You get up things. Yeah, that's the thing that's going to really make me tick each day. Yeah, I guess it's I don't want to be too clichéd here, but it's, it's both Two clear tracks really that I, my mind sort of operates and number one will be my team. How do I make this as exciting a journey for my team as I think it is for me? How do I inspire them to to be that, that best version of themselves, right? So to make sure that they're because it's a challenge and it's quite easy for us to think in terms of, my gosh, I've had this is too difficult and you know, maybe displaying fixed mindset attributes. So it's just trying to turn the dial and make sure that they're really being positive as much as they can. So that really inspires me and just making sure that I've I'd love to think with all the challenges and with all the new ground that we're breaking here in the Middle East and Africa as well. It's similar challenges exist as we go anywhere Subsaharan Africa, your your, your understanding new regulations around data residency, you’re understanding new financial pressures. Nigeria, for example, with the fluctuating the volatility of the exchange rate and and every obstacle is an opportunity. Right. So it's how do I how do I get my team to be recognised within the industry, not just Netskope but as the best at solving problems. If there's a challenge that they've got an answer, they've done it and it's a walk in the park for them now and they're moving on to other things. I love that idea of about my team being being just absolute experts at building because that's what we're when I hire, I really look for people that have got that passion to build from a business, track the other side. Then it's just making sure that our customers can continue to, as they go through that digital transformation. So they're going to care about data, right? So there's all those questions about how secure will it be, how easy and accessible will it be. So they care about data, but I think they also care about people. And I of course they do. And it's that hybrid workforce issue that's still out there to some degree. It's been mitigated in Middle East because a lot more people are going back to the workplace. But there's still there's still a lot of people working after work. Right. So there's still going to be that hybrid work, working aspects. And it's if they care about their people, they want to inspire their people. And if we can be, Netskope, can be part of removing friction from someone saying, there's a real faff about having to connect online. So those tools that they need to do their job well, that's great. It's a small thing, but if we can do that, well, that’s great. And I think we can. So that's it really. For me, it's how do I make life easy for my customers? How do I make it possible for them to consolidate their security toolsets And as they move into the cloud, how do I help them improve their their employee, their team members productivity and reduce risk? I love all that, but mainly my main driver is just about my team, I have to say So that's very nice, I think. Yeah, I mean, you said that really resonates actually when you talk about growth mindset. You said you see an obstacle as a challenge. Yeah, I think that really shows this mindset you have and actually it's about problem solving. Yeah. And it’s about finding solution, solutionisation, or finding ways in which you can get around complex issues. And you know, you and I often go into organisations where they have really complex, diverse problems and yes, we sell technology, but yeah, fundamentally that's what our organisations do. But actually we're solving problems, we’re finding what those problems are, we’re fixing those problems. And, within your team, that mindset I think it's really, really positive. It would be interesting to know, do you look at that when you're hiring, Do you look at that sort of person who can be more resilient? You hear a lot of that nowadays. I'm looking for resilience in the workspace. Is that something you look for? Yeah, it's right up there that and storytelling. So I, chastise myself about being a poor interviewer because, in my mind, I've got this idea of there's got to be these stock questions that you have to ask as a sales leader trying to get you know, tell me about a time when you've faced an obstacle or that you overachieved your number. That's all very well and good. But for me, it's actually it's storytelling. And within if I can get the person to start telling a story about who they are and their journey, starting from an early, fairly early on for me was that's quite important is because if they can comfortably tell the story about where they were when they were at high school and when they went through university and where they are now, I think you'll start if you listen carefully, you'll start to get those little snippets of where they've overcome challenges and that resilience that they've built up. But yeah, and at Netskope, we have this acronym for GRIT. It's, absolutely a key part - So, it’s growth, It's resilience, integrity and teamwork. Right. So if we can if we can see that in the person that we're interviewing, that's brilliant. Big tick. Yeah, actually. I don’t know if you agree or not, but I often believe in technology. Often you can teach people a lot of the other stuff if they've got that resilience, that grit as you defined it, you can teach them the other skills. Yeah, if they're willing to learn and willing to get stuck in and give it a go. And that's something we've experienced certainly at Somerford as well. You know, people have come from a diverse range of backgrounds. Yeah, but they had that skill set. That core drive actually, isn't it really, you know what, I'm going to make this work. You know, here's a problem. I'm going to go and fix it. Yeah, absolutely. interesting. And I suppose we've got to actually very briefly, because I can't let you off without talking about the fact that you did used to in the RAF I knew this was coming! - used to be a pilot but, there must be some attributes that you've taken that you then transferred into business. There must be some transferable skills from those days. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I was there, it feels like a blink of the eye in terms of my how old I am now. But I, and again, very, very early in my career. 1987 was it? No, I started in ‘92. So as that four years from ‘92, yes, so I was a failed pilot. And I know that John (Dee) who works with you. I can not confirm or deny sources! He’d be laughing about this at the moment, but yeah, the so the transferable things that would be very much. Just always, always come in at how do you deal with the challenge. And it's one of the things that sticks in my head from the initial officer training was make a decision, make it bloody quickly. Excuse my language, but you've just got to make and yeah, and then review as you go along and then reassess and adjust and that's, that's been a very valuable lesson. And so whether you are dealing with a team member that perhaps is, you know, struggling or needing some coaching, you just have to make a decision and and sort of help those who help with that stick with that and see whether way where it takes you. Similarly with any obstacle, I think it's just making that you know, decide to act quickly and that I think that's been very much a an attribute that stuck with me throughout my time in I.T. I sort of bring that with a sense of optimism and positivity and and I see that in some of my guys, most of my team actually that they're working in this environment. But for that positivity I think they would, they would flounder a little bit and the ability to make decision quickly. So I mean. You often nowadays you talk about the use of planning paralysis. Yeah. Where people just get so fixated on having to try and be perfect and trying to get that perfect design or that perfect image or whatever it might be. Actually, sometimes just got to go for it. Learn, Okay, we all make mistakes. Yeah - Learn from mistakes, see them, don’t make it again, hopefully, but then improve and seeing those steps of continuous improvement, again, that growth mindset was very, very firmly in that space. Yeah, absolutely. And then the other one is funny. One thinks in terms of fantastic mnemonics or acronyms and so and there was one - SMAQ the armed forces which was situation, mission, ask questions, executive sort of understanding and then confirm understanding and, executables! you may have to edit that one I struggled a little bit to come out. But that's something that sort of is interesting when you're briefing your team. And that's that's also quite useful in terms of particularly over here when English isn't the first language. So yeah, but other than that, you know what, James? I can't remember that much. It was so long ago and it was such a such a short time in my life. It feels that way anyway. But yeah, I certainly, certainly haven't stepped into a plane up the front flying the thing since leaving. So I always find it very interesting because, you know, we've all come from different walks of life in different areas. And as you said, switching back to when you were interviewing people and always getting those different strands that would have influenced you or led you to a decision or to what you are doing now. And so very interested for that point at which those skills that you had taken from from the RAF and then still being used, which is very clear in the reason you gave how long ago it was, you’re still able to recant that and talk about it very, very clearly. Yeah. I'm going to prise you on something, you would be surprised I did some research for, for this, session, and you made a comment on another interview and I thought was a lovely comment actually. I'm really want to see if you can just unpack that a little bit again because it's very interesting and I'm sure that our viewers would love to listen, hear about that as well. And so the quote was, “complexity is the enemy of security”, and I thought was a lovely little caption would you mind if you just going through that and expanding? Yeah, absolutely. I like it, too. I wish I was the author of it. I remember hearing it from someone and I thought that for me encapsulates a lot of what we're trying to have, or, lead as a discussion, with the the people that are dealing with that that very issue and large enterprises or medium sized enterprises. So for me, if you think about the way in which things are constantly evolving and security and we've been we've been responsible for this in some ways with, we'll sell point products, not you, because you're used, you stitch everything together. I know. But for me, my background, I've been at NetScreen, Imperva, McAfee it’s very much a point product type of approach. No matter how much you try and dress it up, that that could be. It fixes a particular problem and that is your given solution. Absolutely. So you get to that issue where you have, you know, the multitude of solutions to deal with a multitude of different sort of attack vectors. And the threat surface is sort of trying to be contained by multiple different solutions. I mean, it's integrating all of that. And it's a problem. It's a problem from how do they integrate to one another. And none of this is new. I mean, I'm not saying anything new here or revolutionary, but it's also a real problem just finding the skill skillsets. So if you look at where I operate, so in South Africa, for example, there's a real problem with skill sets there. So there's the brain drain, which has been going on for a long while and trying to find people that have got the experience to stitch all that fabric of point solutions platform, you know, to make it a platform is very, very problematic. So that leads to this concept of complexity and you're going to have gaps and that's going to be a great way for the threat actors to to find a way in. If we can help these security leaders in organisations consolidate, simplify and inevitably there has to be a reduction in risk. That has to be because we've got some great stories where there's a really amazing customer in the Levant that we've been working with and, you know, 300 odd locations across the Levant. They've got something like 6 million people under their care. They've got hundreds of 600 schools. I think that they provide services to and for the people that go. That’s massive. It’s huge. they were all about simplification. And indeed that's what Netskope's talking about. There's this move towards SASE or SSE secure sort of secure access service edge. One of its central pillars I guess is that consolidation. And I think that's where that that whole complexity is the enemy of security. Things lends itself so well. And anyway, go back to this this customer, you can see that they they had a real problem. They had 15 people managing their their SD-WAN estate. And Netskope basically allowed them to move to a single agent, a single platform, if you will, providing them with an onramp to the Netskope cloud giving them access to the security service edge platform that we provide, which not only then sort of consolidated the the SD-WAN, it consolidated their web proxy, consolidated some threat capability and it consolidated some data protection. So they moved from 15 people to one and two, let's be honest, because they do need to allow that one person to have some time off. But it's great because then they can they can reallocate those other 13 people to doing things that are vital, in light of everything that's going on over there at the moment in the Levant area, very, very valuable. So, with that reduction in personnel, that consolidation has to make life a lot easier for them to reduce risk. And there are some other spin offs to that as well. James You know, we should be looking to improve agility. We should be looking to improve just cost. Yeah, Yeah. As well. So all of those things are great and that's why I do love that. So that, that phrase complexity is the enemy of security because it just leads on to, you know, just another good discussion points. I will be taking it, and coining it! It’s now in the locker! I plagiarised it. You're welcome![Laughter] You touched on a really interesting point there. And this is where the sort of inner geek in me comes out a little bit. You know, when we first started talking, looking at partnering of Netskope, I was so impressed with some of the innovation that had been achieved on the platform. And I think one of the biggest parts of that was the the architecture I think is just incredible. And you look at the, I think you call it the (Netskope) NewEdge in terms of how you’ve taken the approach, which has then lead to a further capabilities and actually the Zero Trust network piece, but also the VPN replacement as well, but actually comes down to fundamentally a vision and it is simplification and how you’ve designed the architecture of Netskope. It would be great if you could maybe just give a little bit of an overview on that because that for me, the inner geek, is like that's cool. That's really cool. Yeah, All, Kudos to Sanjay Beri, our CEO, and Krishna(Narayanaswamy), our CTO. They, you know, are the original founders of Netskope. The story in Netskope goes that Sanjay was describing his idea of what would happen to most enterprise companies that were looking at going to SaaS on a napkin. He was sketching something out about how the fabric of security will have to move out to the edge. It's going to have to move to where closer to where the end user is, all of those sort of things. And he basically sketched out lastly what we use today as our architecture at Netskope. And yeah, it's, it's incredible to think how that's that's kept pace with the way the industry the industry is now looking at SASE really has yeah so when I think back it's the whole CASB piece it was quite simple at that stage. It was how do we provide in real time visibility and control of everything that was previously in the data centre of an enterprise. Now it's out to someone else's data centre or you know, one of the hyperscalers. How do we, how do we provide visibility and control of that? And then it was about, well, let's move the proxy there, let's, let's move the cloud firewall, you know, make it part of it as well. And the platform has evolved into something that's very much built by Netskope from the cloud purposely from the cloud up, if you will. And then and then it was, well, how do we how do we make that sort of ubiquitous and back, I think it was about 2017, we’d just taken a very large round of funding at that stage. And the idea from Sanjay was to then bring in a team of specialists that could build that delivery infrastructure, and that's how New Edge was born. So we've got this amazing team headed up by a guy called Joe DePalo, who'd previously built AWS’ global infrastructure. I was going to say, I'm sure that's a very well known name. I said, Yeah. And he got some guys from Limelight and guys from AWS, and they've started to look at, well, how do we minimise the time necessary to build a new data processing point that's got all complete compute functionality from that scope and wherever we need it, because the vision that we have is how do we connect everyone on regardless of whatever device they're on, wherever they are, to everything that they need to be connected to, be that cloud, SaaS, iPaaS or web, right? So, so that's it's everything to any anything. That's Netskope's vision. So we've now got this New Edge present in over 70, sort of a locations around the world. So if I think of here, we're here in UAE with two points of presence. We've got three points of presence in Saudi, for example, South Africa, got two, Nigeria and it goes on. And then there are these localisation points as well, so we can actually improve the customer experience. But that is all tied in at the time. In 2017, it was, Wow, what are we going to become? Because it felt like, are we going to become a content delivery network? But no, it was very much we need this because the way in which people are going to be moving to digitally transform their networks and their security will have to follow. They're going to need a performant network where we don't have to compromise on security. That was the key. Often you'll be familiar with that. Right? Let's move to the cloud. Let's use the hyperscalers. They're great at driving down costs perhaps, and giving you that elasticity, but they may not be great at giving you exactly what you need from a security point of view. Yeah, Netskope wanted to not have any compromise, you know, so that's that's really what New Edge delivers. Yeah. So that the we just this week just rebranded and relaunched Netskope's vision as Netskope One because for us it's all about, you know, one platform. It's all about one console, it's about one gateway and it's about one client. So if we can again, reduce, eliminate complexity by making everything possible just with one constant that is Netskope, that should allow us to, you know, improve simplicity, consolidate tooling, reduce risk, reduce cost and improve that sort of feeling of customer delight because so too often in that immediate rush after the pandemic, where people just increased the capacity with their VPN concentrator, it just wasn't meant for that. Right. And there was a lot of very unhappy people trying to do what they needed to do and their best, best efforts were being frustrated. So they would they would introduce additional risk by going around things, you know? We’re humans, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Netskope One, it's quite a timely sort of - that’s fresh off the press! Absolutely. And it really ties into the whole simplification right. That you talk about. It's really core, it's interesting how it's all bleeding through the same parts of Netskope I think a lot of people in the region will really appreciate the fact that, you know, you've made the investment, because that goes a long way and actually, to have that point of presence and to have that investment in the region, it does make a difference. so I think that's a really maybe a small point, but actually a very big point for many CIOs and CISOs when they’re maybe considering what that next step might look like, who they can invest in, because it's an investment on both halves. You know, when you move to a new technology, perhaps it's not just the cost of software or software as a service, it's also the cost of change. Yeah. And actually, if you can make that more simple and you've got that presence here, I think that's really, really exciting. Yeah, it's talking to Saudi in particular. I mean, there's a real there's a real drive by the kingdom's sort of cyber leaders, network leaders to make sure that they're following the regulation around data residency. So that that's one of the big things that we decided upon early doors was to to make sure that we can help meet those regulations in every way possible. And it's, it's an ongoing evolution of Netskope. So we've structured, we've invested in creating Netskope Arabia, the entity we're investing and hiring lots of people there. We've invested in the data centres. We've we've also just finished last week we had the CRTC auditors and we're going for a Class C certification, fantastic cloud, because we we believe absolutely it's a necessary investment so that we can be a trusted partner to all our customers. And yeah, there's, there's more that we need to do across the GCC for sure because as, as those well I mean a data residency is a is an interesting you must come across all the time and so it's a it's a thorny issue for a lot of people because it's it no pun intended it's quite a cloudy issue in some regards as well. Right. So it's how how do we how do we put our selves forward to be a trusted advisor that that that can work with organisations around understanding and unpacking the regulations that may apply, that don't apply. And also just looking at things like, well if we don't necessarily meet all of the data residency requirements in, let's say let's take an example of, of Ghana, right, what have we got in terms of compensating controls that that we can then put forward to the regulatory authorities. So it should be good enough because of X, Y and Z, and that's got to take all of that really, really seriously. I mean, so in the States just recently, we've just announced that we've achieved FedRAMP high specification, you know, that's huge. Yes. Yeah. So we're going to now sort of roll that out to some of the customers that we're dealing with or we used to deal with in the UK together. You know, that will matter and we can replicate that in that architecture as well as we build out the New Age architecture globally will be as well as we can following that, that FedRAMP high architecture and best practices. I think that shows again a level of investment. I’ve played a small part in going through FEDRAMP certifications in the past. Yeah, and that is a big old process about certification, that stamp of authority from the US federal. Yeah. So you know all credit and again I think that shows it can be mimicked across the region if you're willing to make that level of investments to get there, especially on high, as a clear sign of what Netskope was trying to achieve. And that speaks to Sanjay's vision right from the day one, I think I'd been hired and literally the first week I went across to, Sunnyvale to meet up with him. And it was very much his at the time. His daughter must have been I think she must've been about four. He wanted to build an iconic security company that when his daughter came home from school or college, you know that the Netskope brand was up there with the big brands of the day. Be Google, Facebook/Meta, whatever, and, and he still holds true to that vision. It's all about building a a standalone security, an iconic security company. It's morphed a little bit and it's no longer just security. Right. So it's networking. We are talking to a lot of networking teams now because of that converge on what SASE brings. Yes. So we are we're looking more and more about how do we how do we make their lives easier? How do we because it's complex for them. They're being challenged by their business leaders to to just do more with the hyperscalers and to make things more available. And that's a real problem. So SASE, can give them that sort of answer. So. Netskope's very much seeing itself having to evolve as well. And, and we're lucky in that that Sanjay's vision sort of predicted, if you will, what Gartner now termed the SASE, architecture. So yeah, it's, it's a privilege to work not only here, but for someone that's got that vision. And it's just it feels like we're just starting it really does. Does it feel like it's still a start up? Oh yeah, yeah that energy and that enthusiasm to just to change and make a difference is writ large over everything we do. But when you look at the Netskope One platform and you think about well what next. I mean if you think about it. So it started off with CASB then then proxy, then firewall, then private access was a TNA, then it's, you know, how do we. How do we bring zero trust principles to other aspects be it SSPM, be it CSPM and and then you've got remote browser isolation and you've all of these functions that can just be delivered from one platform. There's other stuff, you know, if you think about this area in particular, of the world, obviously IoT is a is a major problem. Yeah, but one of the areas(discussed) at LEAP for example, one of the main discussion points apart from, oh my word, how long did you have to wait to get to the toilet? Because the queues were maddening, the big topic of conversation of course, was generative. AI Yeah, and without wanting to seem like and I'm a bit of a cynic at heart as well, right, so. Don’t worry, we can’t get through any anything these days with at least mentioning GenAI/Machine Learning, exactly, It’s like, oh my word. And we seen that, right? Exactly. And it's actually you could if, if you were clever enough or wanted to do it, you could go back over Netskope's sort of publicly available promotional material and you'll see that we talk about AI and machine learning as a way in which we can help organisations from a data protection point of view. We've got we've got over 150 patents for example, and Krishna (Narayanaswamy) the guy I mentioned, the founder and CTO, He's got personally 100. He just got the milestone last week, his hundredth patent, and most of that is around machine learning and AI use. But that generative AI thing is a major concern for most CISOs at the moment, but at Netskope, we're seeing tremendous growth in that. So we came up with a way in which we can use the zero trust engine that we've had since day one to to help understand the context of how AI is being, you know, GenAI is being used. And the more you can understand about context, the better you can actually decide to have a security policy that's right for your business. So over 40% of our customers worldwide now use Netskope to control and give visibility of how they’re using GenAI. So we do things like, well, yeah, you, you know, James, you can use ChatGPT, right? But you, you can only use it if you justify what you're doing. Is it for personal use, is it for corporate use? And then within that we'll look at what are you actually posting into the, the dialogue box and if there's anything there that we deem to be corporate sensitive, obviously we can flag that. We can block it, we can we can coach you in real time so that you're not putting yourself or the company at risk or your customers at risk. So, that's that change in how people are thinking about. I want to use that tool. I always look at this. I think there's another thing I plagiarised about the ostrich that keeps his head in the sand is the first one that's going to be eaten by the lion. Right. And and if you think about the noise and the concern around GenAI, it's largely going to lead to that sort of behaviour. Either you're going to have people that are just going to embrace it and go for it and just think, how do I take this opportunity as an opportunity to improve services to my customers? So for us, for example, we're definitely moving towards how do we use it to help the security operators get the most out of the Netskope platform in the most simple way. So there's that type of idea, or there's those people that are going to think, Well, this is a real risk. It's giving another security threat, vector, if you will. How do I, how do I resolve that? And, and for the latter, if you put your head in the sand, you're going to you will you'll come unstuck. And Netskope can help get your head out. And I'm. I'm torturing this metaphor. I apologise, but it will. And we're seeing that growth, tremendous growth quarter on quarter over our customers going to take that additional capability from Netskope to give them visibility and control in a contextual manner using, you know, the Netskope One platform to that. I'm very much with you, I think the ability to, if you make IT readable and you can make someone with an operations team have the ability to perform their tasks more effectively without having to go into depths and complexibility about behind it, what's happening, you see it more and more now of organisations trying to make it more readable, less code driven. Yeah, and that's, you know, at the heart of what GenAI is all about. Right? And either you're going to get on board and realise that this is a really positive thing, yes, it brings risk, hopefully a bit of complexity. The front end is fine. That's where technologies like Netskope can really help and it's picking up a little bit that what you said about the user piece and actually the education and it's one of the things I think about writing this. This was also about how Netskope yes, you are a a cyber security driven organisation, but how do you get that balance between IT security or cybersecurity and user experience? That's quite a hard thing. And I think IT and certainly IT security has been chastised in the past by the internal users because you're just blocking you're just stopping. I can't do my job. It's not efficient, it's not effective. How do Netskope play into that allow user experience as well as making sure you still have the the top levels of efficiency and security. Yeah. You're, dealing with almost two very distinct user group wants aren’t you and the outcomes for those teams are or people individuals are very different. So from an end user person that may not have anything to do with security, they may be a creative person working for a large, a large sort of publishing company that we've got just down the road here, for example, All they want to know is that they can get to where they want to get to as quickly as possible without having to sign on to anything else, I think. Right. And it's got to be uninterrupted access and then they want to be able to use something that they've heard about from their friends about this amazing tool. Could be Canva, could be something else that, you know, that that gives them an edge. Yeah. So Netskope allows them to do that. It's always on from a from a from a security tool point of view. There's nothing the end user will have to do. It's it's just the the traffic's always being steered to the desktop cloud. And it's, it's at that point then that the security professional has put a policy that fits that user to allow them to have access to the tools that they need to. So back in the day when I first started, the very catchy marketing slogan was, “Allow is the New Block”. You know, it's a twist on, you know, Orange is the New Black, obviously. But and it was very much that it was don't block things because you're going to encourage those users to the bad behaviour. They're going to find a way of getting around it. Right. So if you can allow it and then coach in real time. So one of the things that Netskope will do is for the end user, it'll guide you. So it an average day in an average user life using Netskope could be you go on to something early doors, the morning could be bbc.co.uk and you could look at something and you'll be allowed to that. You could be reminded the fact that Man City are playing someone in the Champions League. And you say or may want to put a bet on that you're you're on your corporate device. For example you spin up some online gambling site and you can be blocked. You could be told this is this is a high risk, non-approved corporate service. You're going to please don't get to it. And that coaching is something that and users really like this that most corporate users are obviously very responsible and they want to be deemed to be responsible. So being told about what you're doing as terms of on a risk basis, that will help and then being steered to proper behaviour, that will also also help. So that's I've gone to a fairly extreme example of, someone being blocked, but there are nuances in terms of James you're using where you are, where you're trying to upload something to your own instance of Google Drive, not Somerford’s instance. Exactly. And that's, that's an unintentional data breach, if you will. So again, most people think, thanks for telling me. It’s human error. Exactly. It’s what we said at the very start, We all make mistakes. So that's that's coaching and making life easy for the end user. And I think that you mentioned it before about New Edge. You know, I said it’s in 70 odd locations. Geographically, it's our own private network. It's all built to optimise that performance. We've got, I think, the highest number of direct periods with peering with Microsoft, with Google, with Facepoint, all the big providers so that we can make sure that there's minimal latency. That's a key thing as well for our end users. So they don't want to think, it's just another blasted security tool. It's going to be adding some sort of time for me to wait for download. Netskope, in some instances, depending on where you are in the world, will actually improve that performance for you because we're peering directly with (Microsoft) Office and so on. And so that's a key win. Looking at the security operations teams then for them it's, just providing them with the ability to get better visibility and understand the risk and then set policies accordingly. So yeah, it's, it's as simple as that, giving them visibility of everything and giving them control of everything that's going through the Netskope cloud and then allowing them to say, well James, no, going back to that example, you're allowed to use your, your own instance of Google Drive. But at the moment I see that you're trying to upload something that is deemed to be corporate sensitive information. We may want to ask you for justification because you're an MD, you may be allowed to do that, or - It’s a prompt right? it’s education, it’s allowing you to have the ability to do something. Yeah, yeah. I said earlier, we all make mistakes as well and sometimes you don't realise it. Yeah, but then what's exciting for us is to leverage that GenAI development that we've got coming in the platform and I am talking about futures. So it may be something that you may want to edit out on - Forward looking statement! But you know, wouldn't it be great to actually have that ability for security operations guys to say or person to say so? So who is the most high risk user at the moment and come back with a raft of data or answers/responses that say, well, it's is Jonathan. And the reason for that is because he's he's constantly looking to use his own versions of OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Drive rather than the corporate instance. And we can see that he's been trying to upload this and he's been to some uncategorised websites of late. So his risk profile has been quite high and it's been, you know, getting marked as a poorer employee from a risk point of view. And we've moved him to a tighter security policy set. And that sort of contextual information could be very useful, right, in terms of just minimising those. Absolutely. You know, you look at the fact that within a SOC or operations team they’ll usually have a SIEM technology. We know very well and often about optimisation that you're looking for that level three or threat hunter who’s going out and searching. If you have the ability to contextualise and give them that information quicker and ask that question, be more proactive in that hunt And also to reduce the hundreds of alerts I'm sure they're getting on the database. Yeah, Yeah. And the other thing that's really exciting, I mean, the average organisation now uses well over two and a half thousand cloud services, right? And we've got this, this amazing library that's always been part of our IP. We call it the cloud confidence index and I think it's got over 80,000 cloud services that we've risk rated. So, there’s many, many attributes we look at how well does that cloud service do security in all intents and purposes. But there's still a lot more that we don't have in that 80,000 library. Right. So wouldn't it be great to say I've got this new service? Just give me a quick score of how likely is it to be good, bad or very, you know, in somewhere in the middle? Yeah. So that's also something we can do that. But at the moment. But it would mean that there's got to be, you know, the, user will have to actually know their way around the CCI, the cloud confidence index and they can look at similar cloud services to the one that they want to introduce. If we can simplify that, make it easier, quicker, then brilliant. I think that's a really exciting development coming down. We’re good to go for one more question before we’re going to have to wrap up. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed everything and the topic of conversation. Likewise. Thank you. And as I said, a little bit of the inner geek in me comes out when I talk about Netskope because I think it's a absolutely phenomenal platform and I really get the one message and that's lovely to hear. That's a new theme that you going to be taking forward and the way in which it's been architected, how you're solving business problems. But generally for users, you know, we all want to try and have one device, with our corporate and other personal applications. Yeah. Simplification of the user. I’d like to finish with one question, if you don't mind. I'd just like to ask at the end of these these sessions together. For you looking back, and this is now going a little bit away from technology back to you and you and your career. If you could look back to that sort of 21 year old person, who’s just graduated from Cape Town University in chemistry. Yeah. What would be that one bit of advice looking back now that you could say, look, there's one thing take this, it'll help you in years to come. Wow. Yeah, that's that's the question I actually ask my interviewees. So, I've never thought about it myself. So, I think I would say that it would be don't, be in such a rush to move on and be a bit more forgiving about some of the, bumps in the road that you're going to encounter in your career. And I think it's quite interesting. I've got, as I mentioned, six kids and as some of them, all but two of them are sort of finished with education and starting out on those first steps of their careers. And it's there's that want to have immediate success. Yeah. And actually I was I was guilty that when I look back at my career that you know what I did a few years here, a few years there. The RAF few years was mitigated by the fact I was rubbish. So they did need to get rid of me. So yeah, so yeah, I think, I think that's it. It's actually think about what the, you know, the things that are important to you is, is it, is it going to be a vehicle that is going to give you that ability to be inspired? And if it is. But think about that where that comes in terms of the financial reward, obviously we need to be paid, that's clear. But there there are other sort of things in there that are equally important. I think at the early stage of my career, I didn't really have anyone mentoring me and I didn't I didn't actually go and get a mentor until a bit later. But to give me an understanding about the holistic value that you should be looking for from where your where you're working it's is very much a partnership, isn't it? And I’m sure you’re looking for it when you grow your team, you know, we're, we demand a lot because it's a fast paced, fast paced environment that we're working in. And if things go wrong, as they inevitably do, you need to be available. So, the people have got to sort of just think about, is it right? Am I in the right team? Is the culture right? And that's a big thing for us and for me, particularly as the team. When we talk about companies culture, I think it's actually really it's the team that's local that drives that culture. Is that right for you? And does that, does that, does that give you a sense of inspiration? Therefore, make sure that you remind yourself and don't don't be attracted by something shiny and bright and go off quickly. I completely agree, just to close by saying something I've seen and obviously, we've known each other now for a few years and working with you alongside you that I think what resonates and I think it's a good characteristic it's you wouldn't ask your team or any individual to do something you wouldn't and you're more than happy to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in as well as doing the day job. Yeah, and I think that's a real characteristic. It bleeds through culture and I reckon I can recognise that. So that's fantastic. I really appreciate the answer. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for this! Been great fun. That's a wrap!