Building on our last post about Netskope's traffic steering, let's take a closer look at the Netskope Client. This is the most widely deployed mechanism for steering inline traffic, accounting for approximately 90% of such traffic from our customers. It's designed to overcome historic secure web gateway (SWG) pain points, especially the friction often experienced with traditional appliance-based proxies.

The Netskope Client, as a cornerstone of our SASE platform, offers several key advantages for modern security and user experience:

• Zero Trust at the Endpoint: Implements a Zero Trust approach directly on the user's device. This eliminates the need for "hair-pinning" traffic when users are roaming outside the corporate network, ensuring consistent security.

• Simplified Certificate Management: Provides native certificate management capabilities, removing the operational challenges of maintaining in-house Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) when leveraging the Netskope certificate.

• Flexible Steering Modes: Offers various traffic steering modes. It primarily uses "Direct mode" (often referred to as "DNS mode"), a form of DNS-based steering that avoids complex packet management and eliminates the need for complex PAC file hosting, configuration, and distribution.

• Forced User Attribution: Requires user attribution at the endpoint. This streamlines user-to-IP mapping, eliminating the need for complex post-authentication fact tables to achieve user attribution at the log level.

• Empowering User Awareness & Education: Allows for customizable user notifications that can proactively guide users and promote secure behavior. This feature enables prompting users to justify their actions when engaging with applications, fostering a culture of security awareness rather than simply blocking access, and thus avoiding potential disruptions to business-critical workflows.

• Granular Process Level Bypass: Enables bypassing traffic at the individual process level. This is crucial for avoiding the need to bypass all traffic for broad services like AWS or GitHub, simply because a specific component (e.g., an S3 CLI tool used by developers) has not yet had the Netskope certificate inserted into its custom certificate store. This also extends to allowing targeted bypass for certificate-pinned flows, where native clients (e.g., certain applications for Google Drive, Dropbox, or financial apps) "pin" their server certificates and would otherwise break if SSL decryption were attempted. This ensures essential business applications remain functional.

• Enhanced Digital Experience Monitoring (P-DEM Pro & Enterprise): When leveraged with P-DEM Pro and Enterprise, the Netskope Client delivers unparalleled visibility into the end-user digital experience. It provides granular, hop-by-hop telemetry from the device to the application, helping IT and network teams quickly pinpoint the root cause of performance issues—whether it's on the device, the network (including the Netskope POP), or the application itself. This proactive monitoring and diagnostic capability significantly reduces troubleshooting time and improves overall user productivity.

The Netskope Client is more than just a steering agent; it's an intelligent component that delivers powerful security, streamlined operations, and an optimized user experience across your distributed workforce.

In our next post, we'll discuss how to achieve granular visibility and extract maximum value from the Netskope SASE platform!

Further Reading: Critical Netskope Client Resources

For more in-depth technical details on the Netskope Client and its capabilities, explore these official resources:

• Netskope Client Overview: Understand the core functionalities and benefits of the client.

  • https://docs.netskope.com/en/netskope-client-overview/

• Deploy the Netskope Client: Comprehensive guide on various deployment methods.

  • https://docs.netskope.com/en/deploy-the-netskope-client/

• Netskope Client Configuration: Learn how to customize client settings and profiles.

  • https://docs.netskope.com/en/netskope-client-configuration/

• Netskope Client Troubleshooting Guide: Find solutions to common client-related issues.

  • https://docs.netskope.com/en/netskope-client-troubleshooting-guide/

• Proactive Digital Experience Management (P-DEM) Overview: Learn how P-DEM provides deep insights into user experience.

  • https://docs.netskope.com/en/proactive-digital-experience-management/