Cloud security and networking startup Netskope Inc. is beefing up its suite of artificial intelligence-powered cybersecurity tools to protect against data loss through the growing adoption of generative AI technologies.

The new features announced in SkopeAI today are meant to overcome the limitations of traditional cybersecurity tools and provide enhanced data loss prevention, Netskope said.

Founded in 2012, Netskope offers a Secure Access Service Edge or SASE platform that provides discovery, visibility and granular control of sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud apps. The company raised a bumper $401 million funding round earlier this year, and its flagship Intelligent Security Service Edge offers a converged, cloud-based service designed to transform security at the perimeter, helping companies stay ahead of cloud, data and network security challenges.

Netskope says enterprises have an urgent need for more enhanced data protection technologies. One reason for this is the growing prevalence of unstructured data.

According to projections from International Data Corp., almost 80% of enterprise data by 2025 will be unstructured — images, generative AI application prompts, messages in collaboration apps, scanned written documents and so on. The problem is that this data cannot be identified or analyzed adequately by legacy data protection tools.

At the same time, enterprises are becoming more dependent on generative AI applications. Netskope’s new Cloud & Threat Report, published today, found that the average organization of 10,000 users or more accesses at least five generative AI apps on a daily basis. Users will invariably send sensitive data to these tools, increasing the risks to organizations.

The newest innovations, available in SkopeAI today, are designed to counter these threats, Netskope said. SkopeAI now offers deeper contextual awareness that enables it to identify, analyze and protect unstructured data throughout an organization.

At the same time, its new automated data classification and “Train Your Own Classifiers” technology is able to automatically identify and categorize new data using a “train-and-forget” approach. According to Netskope, this will help it to ensure data is protected with the most appropriate safeguards in place.

These new techniques are combined with Netskope’s recently announced protections for ChatGPT and other chatbots, which analyze the flow of information being sent to them, preventing sensitive data from being uploaded.

In addition to these new capabilities, SkopeAI is being updated with new, AI-powered threat detection features that can detect and protect against multivarious attacks, polymorphic malware, novel phishing web domains, zero-day threats and malicious web content, the company said.

“Unstructured data has a very different nature to structured data, which has been the focus of numerous offerings to manage and protect it,” said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “As the amount of unstructured data grows and it becomes more widely used, enterprises require a different set of tools to take care of it. So AI looks to be coming to the rescue, enabling a new level of automation.”

According to Netskope co-founder and Chief Executive Sanjay Beri, his company has been using advanced AI techniques for threat detection and data protection long before the technologies became trendy.

“Netskope has fully aligned the use of AI and machine learning with the needs of modern security and threat defense, democratizing access to data security,” he said. “SkopeAI unleashes the power of AI and ML to protect structured and unstructured data and defend enterprises from ever-evolving threats.”

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