AI Protection: How Netskope and Optiv Secure AI

July 16, 2026

The State of AI Protection and How Netskope and Optiv Secure AI

AI investment in the enterprise space is accelerating rapidly. This momentum is part of the continuing multi-decade era in which AI becomes embedded across industries – reshaping global economic activity, geopolitics and cultural change.

As enterprises adopt AI across their organizations, they must recognize that these investments require a shift from reactive oversight to proactive monitoring and governance across the entire AI environment. AI has evolved from static, rule-based systems for simple automation to machine learning for analytics and forecasting, and now to deep learning, large language model (LLM)-based generative AI, and agentic technologies that are highly contextual and increasingly embedded in core enterprise functions.

Examples of these AI integrations include:

• Customer Support Agents: Managing high-volume chats and resolving customer inquiries
• Software Development: Writing, documenting and debugging code
• Intelligent Knowledge Management: Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to query internal documentation and policies for fast, concise answers
• Marketing and Content Generation: Producing high-volume content for blogs, social media and personalized advertising
• Legal and Compliance Analysis: Reviewing documents, including contracts, for jurisdictional context, redlining and risk identification

Evolving AI Communication Patterns

As organizations expand their use of AI, they must address a growing and increasingly complex set of AI communication paths. AI systems no longer interact through a single cloud-based channel; they now communicate across public services, private infrastructure, application interfaces, agentic protocols and local networks.

These communication patterns include:

• Model Inference Endpoints: AI workloads may connect to public endpoints over the internet, private endpoints within internal networks or open-model endpoints that use standardized interfaces so developers can switch underlying models without rewriting code
• Application and Tooling Interfaces: AI communications often occur through REST APIs, GraphQL APIs and gRPC services that connect models, applications and enterprise systems
• Agentic Communications: Emerging agent-to-agent workflows rely on protocols such as model context protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent (A2A) to coordinate tasks, share context and execute actions across systems
• Event-Driven Channels: Webhooks, WebSockets and server-sent events support real-time updates and automated interactions between AI tools and business applications
• Hybrid Deployment Patterns: AI traffic is no longer limited to the cloud; organizations host private LLMs, run AI tools on endpoints and communicate across local networks through east-west traffic, as well as between on-premises environments and cloud services through north-south traffic

Traditional Security Tools Are No Longer Enough

Organizations must discover, secure and govern AI communications across both internal and external environments. Key priorities include preventing sensitive data exposure through data loss prevention (DLP), blocking AI-specific attacks such as prompt injection and extending controls to on-premises deployments as adoption expands. They also need real-time visibility and protection for agents and MCP traffic, along with the ability to monitor and regulate access to AI platforms such as Claude, Claws, Antigravity and agentic browsers.

Most customers do not know how much AI traffic they are generating. Identifying these sources is essential – AI agents may be private or cloud-based, connecting to multiple data components and constantly evolving. It is important to track these connections since they enable AI tools to acquire new skills and information. Also, the rapid pace of code development means each organization faces unique challenges. Organizations need to discover these connections and determine which ones are trustworthy and create and enforce policies that meet the business requirements. Traditional security tools may struggle to keep pace with the rapid growth and evolving nature of AI systems and interactions. A new generation of tools and skills is needed to ensure the proper controls are in place for securing AI and these controls quickly adapt to this ever-changing environment. The question is no longer whether organizations will adopt AI but how they can do so securely.

Netskope Helps Organizations Say ‘Yes’ to AI Without Increasing Risk

Trusted by more than 4,500 customers worldwide – including leading financial services, healthcare, telecom and retail organizations, as well as small and midsize enterprises – Netskope provides AI visibility and control through its high-performance NewEdge cloud network, advanced data security and Zero Trust architecture that applies protection to every AI interaction.

Netskope protects enterprise AI using its Netskope One AI Security platform, offering visibility, DLP and threat defense for public apps, private models and autonomous AI agents. Context-aware zero trust controls stop data from reaching an AI model, maintaining compliance and supporting innovation.

The following overview highlights Netskope’s next-generation AI security capabilities, along with the proven methods and controls it has developed over time.

1. Visibility and Risk Governance (Shadow AI Control)

Netskope enables enterprises to monitor their AI ecosystem and prevent unauthorized "shadow AI" use:

• Cloud Confidence Index (CCI): Dynamically tracks and profiles the risk behavior of over 1,800 generative AI applications and 85,000 software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools and evaluates how these apps use customer data, whether they use prompts for model training and their overall compliance posture
• Instance Awareness: Distinguishes between personal and corporate instances of identical apps (e.g., allowing corporate ChatGPT access while blocking personal accounts)
• User Coaching: Intercepts risky user behaviors in real time, serving educational pop-ups to guide users away from unsafe sites toward corporate-sanctioned AI tools 

2. Runtime Defenses (AI Guardrails)

Netskope One AI Guardrails are positioned between users and LLMs during live sessions to prevent active exploitation:

• Attack Prevention: Analyzes multi-stage intent to actively block sophisticated AI-specific attacks, including prompt injections and jailbreak attempts
• Content Moderation: Automatically filters prompts and model outputs for legal or reputational risks, checking for copyright violations, hate speech, bias or inappropriate materials
• Framework Mapping: Correlates intercepted threats to known industry standards like MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs

3. Data Protection and Safe Pipelines

Netskope stops proprietary data from leaking into public training pools or unauthorized databases:

• Inline DLP Filtering: Utilizes advanced machine learning to identify and block sensitive content – such as source code, passwords, intellectual property or personally identifiable information (PII) – from being submitted into prompts
• Data Security Posture Management (DSPM): Scans enterprise cloud storage (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) to find and secure vulnerable files before they can accidentally feed into RAG training loops
• AI Red Teaming: Automates adversarial testing on an enterprise's private AI models, running over 18,000 vulnerability scenarios to patch weak links before deployment

4. Securing Agentic AI and Machine-to-Machine Workflows

Netskope offers specialized infrastructure to manage automated agents as enterprise architectures evolve from simple chatbots to autonomous systems:

• Agentic Broker: Monitors and regulates MCP communications, tracking non-human traffic, enforcing least-privilege access and ensuring automated agents do not execute unintended business actions
• AI Gateway: Deploys as a lightweight virtual appliance inside private infrastructure (like AWS or VMware) to monitor, log and secure purely internal, machine-to-machine API traffic that never touches the public internet

5. Provide AI Security Without Performance Tradeoffs

Netskope’s NewEdge network is a global, carrier-grade private network built to scale with today’s rapidly growing AI traffic and future demand. Resilient and high performing, it powers the Netskope One platform and delivers the protections organizations need to use AI securely without compromising speed.

• NewEdge AI Fast Path: Directly connects users to major AI destinations, such as OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic and Claude, Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Foundation, Google Vertex, as well as NeoClouds (GPUs) such as CoreWeave, Lambda, Vultr, Nebius and TogetherAI
• Data Sovereignty: Egresses traffic within national borders in over two dozen countries, allowing heavily regulated industries to safely utilize external AI while complying with local data-residency laws

6. Bringing It All Together With Netskope One AI Command Center

Netskope One AI Command Center delivers comprehensive visibility across your entire AI environment, including AI apps, embedded AI within SaaS and MCP servers that power autonomous agents. Connected risk insights let you govern and control all activity, from shadow AI and high-risk behavior to DLP violations and AI threats. Think of AI Command Center as your AI central nervous system.

• AI App Governance: Detects unapproved personal and shadow AI app usage across all environments in real time to eliminate blind spots
• MCP Detection: Prevents unauthorized integrations by identifying unmanaged MCP server traffic operating outside IT visibility
• AI Auditing: Maintains an inventory of AI assets with risk scores, usage activity, threats and any policy or guardrail violations to simplify compliance
• AI Risk Assessment: Automates AI tool evaluation with automated risk scoring of applications, including security posture, compliance status and embedded AI features
• Threat Triage: Speeds incident response by identifying high-risk user behavior and related policy, guardrail violations, AI threats and content issues

Optiv and Netskope Together for Stronger Security

With 30 years at the forefront of cybersecurity, Optiv brings expertise, a strong partnership with Netskope and the technical depth to tackle your AI challenges. Optiv serves as your one partner to advise, deploy and operate your cybersecurity programs that help reduce risk and deliver real results for more than 6,000 clients.

Together, Optiv and Netskope can help you:

• Simplify operations
• Decrease security risks and exposures
• Reduce costs for appliances, bandwidth and full-time employees (FTEs)
• Increase agility to drive more business