The Best Netskope Alternatives for Cloud Collaboration Security
The modern world of work is an always-on digital environment filled with new risks that must be addressed to protect valuable business data. One of the most overlooked risk surfaces is collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. Here, employees can connect and share information in real time, syncing files across multiple devices in moments and editing or removing messages at will. In this post, we explore Netscape’s capabilities as a security solution for this dataset and compare with other top competitors to help leaders make informed decisions about collaboration security for their businesses.
Contents
- What is Netskope?
- The benefits of using Netskope
- How Netskope falls short as a collaboration security solution
- Netskope alternatives for cloud collaboration security
What is Netskope?
Netskope helps give businesses visibility and control of their data within cloud-based collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Netskope Intelligent SSE, part of the Netskope Security Cloud, helps control access to restricted tools and limit information sharing within them by correlating uploads and downloads to follow the movement of files and other data.
As well as supporting security in collaboration tools, Netskope delivers a range of cloud-based solutions to mitigate risks and support data loss prevention in the digital workplace.
The benefits of using Netskope
With Netskope, businesses can take a proactive approach to securing their digital workplace tools and gain enhanced control over the flow of information through all the applications where employees work. With Netskope, organizations can unlock:
Cloud Security
Limiting how employees connect to tools and share data within them.
Data Protection
Giving leaders better oversight into how employees share data.
Threat Protection
Reducing the risk of malicious activity within digital workplace tools.
Secure Remote Work
With granular controls to mitigate unauthorized activity.
Compliance Controls
That support requirements for regulated industries.
Shadow IT Reduction
Limiting the number of collaboration tools in use across the enterprise.
Using Netskope, businesses can take a broad overview of user activity within digital workplace and collaboration apps, helping to mitigate risky behavior from a centralized security platform.
How Netskope falls short as a collaboration security solution
While Netskope is a widely recognized and effective cloud security platform, it's important to note its limitations and shortcomings, including:
- Complexity: Implementing and managing a comprehensive security solution like Netskope can be complex and expensive, especially for organizations without dedicated security teams or those new to cloud security practices. The platform's extensive features and customization options might require significant time investment to master.
- Integration Challenges: Integrating Netskope into an existing IT ecosystem might require adjustments to workflows and processes. Ensuring smooth integration with other network security tools and platforms can sometimes be challenging.
- Low Visibility: Some collaboration tools include end-to-end encryption and other security measures of their own that can prevent Netskope from documenting the full context of messages exchanged by employees.
- End User Experience: Security safeguards that create a poor user experience by slowing down connections or blocking legitimate messages can fuel an increase in shadow IT within an organization. As with other CASBs, Netskope creates a barrier between users and apps that may degrade the overall user experience.
- No Contextual Insights: Netskope does not score collaboration messages for sentiment or toxic content as some competitors do, creating gaps in reporting on areas of increased risk that could enable more proactive oversight.
- Limited AI/ML Capabilities: While Netskope offers AI and machine learning workflows to enhance data management and detection, it is primarily based on keyword matching and OCR image analysis, both technologies widely available elsewhere.
These are some of the challenges frequently raised by real Netskope users across third-party review sites.
Netskope reviews
“It is not easy to integrate Netskope with some other security tools. It needs a bit more research and brainstorming to do that.”
“The implementation part takes some time due to the complexities involved. In general, our company puts in a lot of effort, especially in coordination, to manage the solution's implementation.”
“The solution’s cost is not user-friendly. If you buy the full version, it is costly.”
“…they take a long time to escalate tickets. It takes one week to escalate regular incidents while they respond to incidents for follow-ups.”
“Netskope CASB can improve by working more similarly to a VPN technology instead of a proxy. They then could have visibility on the endpoint device.”
“Netskope client often impact the internet speed on end user machines, even sometimes killing the internet completely.”
Netskope alternatives for cloud collaboration security
Aware for cloud collaboration security
Aware helps security teams control and protect valuable and sensitive information within cloud collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Workplace from Meta, and Google Drive. Proprietary AI models ingest data in real time to automatically identify and remediate risky information sharing as it occurs, enabling infosec leaders to take a proactive approach to defending their digital workplace.
Built for this specific dataset, Aware offers best-in-class AI and natural language processing (NLP) analysis of collaboration messages as they happen, producing results with greater accuracy and fewer false positives than any competitor. Then Aware’s workflow library connects seamlessly with thousands of integrations through APIs and webhooks, accelerating security processes and enforcing acceptable use policies without impacting the end user experience.
Using Aware, security leaders can accelerate incident response and early case investigations, respond rapidly to mitigate infosec incidents, and automate information governance policies that shield cloud collaboration data from unauthorized access or exfiltration.
Exterro for cloud collaboration security
Exterro provides legal software designed for eDiscovery and related processes capable of handling large electronic data volumes that can arise from litigation, investigations, or regulatory requests. Exterro’s data management capabilities encompass many electronic formats, including emails, documents, instant messages, and social media posts.
To facilitate data management from its central platform, Exterro integrates with many enterprise applications, including Office 365, Slack, Box, Google Drive and more. Drawing from these data sources, admins can use Exterro to analyze electronically stored information (ESI), identify relevant documents, and produce legal responses based on these findings.
As a legal GRC software, Exterro’s functionality is limited to search, investigation, and privacy tools that meet specific use cases. For businesses seeking more comprehensive information security and analytics, Exterro may fall short. Additionally, reviewers note that extracting data with Exterro can be slow and the licensing model can be prohibitively high.
Global Relay Archive for cloud collaboration security
Global Relay Archive automatically captures data from a variety of sources, including email, instant messaging, voice, and social media. It then indexes and stores the data in a secure, tamper-proof repository that meets compliance retention requirements while being easily accessible for eDiscovery and audits.
By leveraging Global Relay Archive’s AI-assisted workflows, admins can accelerate search and discovery workflows and better understand end user behavior and the risk and value of the data they hold. Using these tools, Global Relay Archive can help organizations to comply with a variety of regulations, including SEC Rule 17a-4, FINRA Rule 4511(c), and HIPAA.
Although Global Relay Archive provides a valuable ingestion and archiving service, some reviewers found canceling the service to be "a nightmare," and others were shocked by the cost of downloading their information at the end of their contract, accusing Global Relay Archive of “effectively holding your data hostage.”
Learn more about Global Relay Archive for cloud collaboration security
Veritas Alta SaaS Protection for cloud collaboration security
Veritas Alta protects against SaaS data loss via a fully managed automated backup solution. This helps organizations improve their risk posture by strengthening ransomware resilience and supporting compliance retention requirements.
With integrations to top SaaS platforms, including Slack, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Office 365, users can mitigate risk across their tech stack and realize potential cost savings by consolidating the storage of historical data. As with other archiving services, however, users may be unable to access earlier backups, and some reviewers find it complex to initiate and not cost-effective for SMBs.
Learn more about Veritas Alta for cloud collaboration security
Zscaler for cloud collaboration security
Zscaler’s cloud access security broker (CASB) supports securing SaaS cloud data in transit and at rest by filtering all activity through its zero-trust exchange. This enables admins to understand how data is accessed and transmitted within the digital workplace, and identify unauthorized exfiltration or the existence of shadow IT.
As with other CASB solutions, Zscaler can control the movement of data and users as they pass the exchange barrier, but lacks insight into activity happening behind that wall, such as on-prem exfiltration from printing or copying data. It may also slow down app speeds, creating frustration for end users.
Aware: An all-in-one solution for security, DLP, compliance monitoring, and governance
Aware provides real-time security, governance, and insights for collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom from an AI-powered platform built to tackle the challenges of insider risk prevention, noncompliance, DLP and more in this unique dataset.
Why real users trust Aware:
- “Ability to run quick searches across the enterprise is awesome, even if msg was deleted.”
- “The ability to keep a pulse on employee conversation sentiment has been valuable.”
- “Love being able to pull the exact same report month to month.”
- “Customer support has been amazing!”
- “No complaints while using this software program.”
Learn more about Aware
Aware for Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
- Identify and locate sensitive information within large, complex datasets
- Respond in real time to data loss incidents
- Take proactive control with automated workflows and customizable policies
Aware for Federated Search & Discovery
- Find the data you need in minutes from Aware’s search-ready archive
- AI-infused metadata adds new parameters to enhance results, including sentiment and toxicity
- Understand the full context behind results with 360-degree overview
Aware for Compliance Adherence
- Create and automatically enforce granular data retention policies
- Coach employees in real time when violations are detected
- Supports all major compliance regulations, including FINRA, HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR, PCI
Aware for Data Management & Governance
- Understand the scale of risk in collaboration tools and respond effectively
- Insights normalized for your organization provide enhanced results with fewer false positives
- Spot and remediate suspicious activity as it occurs
Harness the voice of your employees
Secure and manage communications across your collaboration stack while proactively listening to the voice of your employees and supporting them in the workplace.
Reinforce your data management and information governance strategy by elevating the employee voice to holistically surface areas of enhanced risk. Aware’s proprietary NLP capabilities provide best-in-class sentiment and toxicity detection, helping leaders to address workplace dissatisfaction and improve the overall employee experience.
Learn more about Aware for employee experience
Unify governance and minimize noncompliance with one solution
Aware enables workspace administrators to adopt a cohesive strategy for managing information security, compliance, and employee experience throughout their collaboration stack, all from a centralized platform. Request a demo today to learn more.
