Netskope has added network path optimization capabilities to its NewEdge infrastructure with the goal of improving the performance of business traffic to widely used AI services and platforms.
This product, NewEdge AI Fast Path, is available to existing Netskope customers. It is designed to improve routing between enterprise users and AI applications hosted across public clouds, private clouds, and “neocloud” environments.
Netskope is making this announcement in response to IT leaders’ concerns about the strain the use of AI will place on network performance and security management. The report cites a recent survey in which 18% of infrastructure and operations leaders said they are fully confident that their teams and budgets can meet the increasing demands for performance, resiliency, and security that come with AI deployment.
According to the company, organizations often face a trade-off between security vetting and user experience when their staff accesses AI services. Depending on your environment, that strain can cause slow connections, inspection gaps, or workarounds to bypass controls.
Focus on latency
AI Fast Path focuses on reducing end-to-end latency in common AI workflows. Netskope highlights “time to first token” as a key metric for conversational AI, measuring the delay between the user’s prompt and the start of the model’s response.
Netskope also points to optimizing agent AI workflows, where the system makes a series of requests to perform a multi-step task. These patterns can increase the number of network round trips between your enterprise and external AI services.
Other areas of focus include performance when large language models access distributed data and when organizations use search extension generation. In these setups, the connection between the model and the data store becomes more important as the model queries the external source and incorporates the results into the output.
How the network works
This approach relates to how the NewEdge network is built and connected to major Internet destinations. Netskope operates its own data center footprint, which serves as the delivery layer for services on the Netskope One platform, including security and connectivity products.
According to Netskope, NewEdge spans more than 120 data centers across more than 75 regions. Each location runs a full set of edge services, allowing traffic to enter the NewEdge fabric closer to users and sites.
A key element of AI Fast Path is peering and interconnectivity that brings NewEdge closer to large cloud and AI service providers. According to Netskope, NewEdge has more than 11,000 network adjacencies, connecting more than 750 unique autonomous system numbers, and added more than 1,000 new adjacencies in the past 12 months.
According to Netskope, these connections cover popular AI destinations and underlying cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
Netskope also uses a routing system called NewEdge Route Control. It says the system uses telemetry from network and application monitoring to find faster paths to AI destinations, making tens of thousands of route changes each day to find routes that avoid traffic jams and provider connectivity issues.
security and routing
Netskope says the architecture is designed to avoid having to choose between inspection and speed. We also focus on service level agreements that cover availability, traffic handling, and security effectiveness.
AI Fast Path is offered alongside Netskope’s other security and connectivity products, including the Security Service Edge and Secure Access Service Edge products and AI security controls. Netskope sells its platform to security and networking teams that manage access to SaaS, web, private applications, and AI services.
Joe DePalo, Netskope’s chief platform officer, said in a statement that the product ties in with changing user expectations.
“As organizations move at the speed of AI, trade-offs between security and performance are unacceptable and unnecessary,” DePalo said. “Netskope is recognized as a market leader for combining security strengths and network performance directly at the net level, and in some cases even better than the net, for nearly every user on the path. This includes optimizing the user experience for business-critical AI. We are excited to help our customers meet their needs for AI speed without adding unnecessary risk.”
Netskope has published additional details regarding the NewEdge AI Fast Path announcement here.
As demand for managed access to external AI services grows and enterprises increase production use of AI across departments and workflows, the company will continue to expand NewEdge’s footprint and interconnection reach.
