Netskope introduces NewEdge AI Fast Path
Netskope introduced NewEdge Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fast Path, a set of network path optimization capabilities within its NewEdge private cloud that the company said was available to Netskope customers to reduce latency, lower costs, improve performance, and strengthen resilience for business-critical AI applications.
A Netskope-cited survey found only 18% of infrastructure and operations leaders felt completely confident their current team and budget could meet the performance, resilience, and security demands of the AI Edge Resource Allocator (ERA). The release said enterprises often faced trade-offs between security and user experience due to outdated security tools or reliance on inadequate network infrastructure, which resulted in stalled AI adoption, bypassed traffic inspection, or users working around security controls.
The company described NewEdge as a carrier-grade private cloud that underpinned the Netskope One platform and provided security, networking, analytics, and AI services. NewEdge included more than 120 data centers in over 75 regions with full compute at the edge and a complete Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) stack at each location, more than 11,000 network adjacencies to over 750 autonomous system numbers, and NewEdge Route Control that used rich telemetry and made tens of thousands of route changes per day to identify faster paths and route around congestion or Internet Service Providers (ISP) connectivity issues.
The release listed specific AI Fast Path use cases including faster inference to reduce time-to-first-token, acceleration of agentic AI workflows, optimization of Large Language Model (LLM) access to large distributed data via Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateways, and support for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) by speeding connectivity between LLMs and external data sources. “With organizations moving at AI speed, any trade-off between security and performance is unacceptable, and also unnecessary,” said Joe DePalo, Chief Platform Officer, Netskope. The company said the capabilities were available to Netskope customers and that NewEdge was architected to allow rapid addition of data centers and increased capacity so platform services remained on and performant.