Netskope expands in SAARC with leadership promotion & new centres

Netskope has announced the promotion of Ajay Gupta to Vice President and Country Manager for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region.

Gupta, who has been with Netskope since 2018 when the company first established operations in India, previously served as Country Manager SAARC. Over the past seven years, he has overseen significant growth for Netskope in the region, with the company expanding its office presence to Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and, more recently, Hyderabad and Kolkata.

During this period, Netskope has substantially increased its local employee base to better serve its customers across India and SAARC. The company now operates its second largest development centre globally within India, highlighting the importance of the region to its worldwide operations.

The expansion of Netskope's infrastructure in India has also accelerated, with three new full compute data centres added over the last twelve months. This development brings the total number of Netskope's Indian data centres to eight, located strategically in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai. These centres are designed to enable fully local processing, supporting optimised user experiences as well as network resilience and security.

According to Netskope, the continued investment in local NewEdge cloud infrastructure aims to provide Indian organisations with enhanced coverage, consistent end-to-end performance, increased resilience against potential disruptions such as natural disasters, and integrated networking and security services. This approach is intended to support the specific demands of local deployments, including for customers in highly regulated sectors.

One recent customer implementation cited by Netskope involved a large IT sector client, where its Security Service Edge (SSE) solutions were provided to 250,000 employees. This underscores the scale Netskope is addressing in the region.

Commenting on the company's deployment, Ashwinkuumar Gaikwad, Head of IT Infrastructure, Data Centre, Cloud Journey, Network & Security at Tata Motors Limited, stated: "Deploying Netskope transformed our cloud security and zero trust strategy. Netskope has invested significantly in its NewEdge India infrastructure to enhance user experience, security control, and network performance. The deployment process was smooth, and the support team was exceptional."

Tony Burnside, Senior Vice President and Head of APAC at Netskope, said: "Our success in India and SAARC is validation that local organisations and security leaders see Netskope as a relevant value proposition as they seek to modernise and converge their security and networking solutions. Customers are turning to us to drive consolidation within their technology stack, combining market-leading security, networking, and analytics products including unified SD-WAN. Ajay and his team have driven success by building further on solid foundations, and I want to congratulate him on this well-deserved promotion, and the team on their excellent work."

Netskope's expansion in SAARC is being supported through new partnerships, with the company adding strategic partners to its channel ecosystem. These partners are helping to advance the availability of modern security technologies in countries with less mature markets across the region.

Ashok Prabhu, Chief Executive - Sales at Noventiq ValuePoint, commented: "In a fast-changing world, Indian organisations are recognising an urgent need to modernise their security and networking infrastructure to better serve their goals and challenges. Netskope is a valuable technology partner for us, with a clear vision for the evolution of security and networking, regularly recognised for its technical leadership. Our continued partnership will enable us to further support the region's organisations in staying ahead of threats and maximising corporate outcomes."

Netskope's customer base has grown to over 3,900 globally, with more than 30 of the Fortune 100 among its clients. The company provides a platform that seeks to help organisations manage security across cloud services, artificial intelligence, software-as-a-service applications, the web, and private applications while focusing on risk reduction, visibility, and performance.