SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 25, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Netskope (NASDAQ: NTSK), a leader in modern security and networking for the cloud and AI era, today announced NewEdge AI Fast Path, a set of capabilities that efficiently optimize network paths to critical AI destinations, including AI applications hosted in public, private, or neo-clouds. Available now to Netskope customers, NewEdge AI Fast Path capabilities help reduce latency and costs, optimize performance, strengthen resilience, and enable a secure experience for teams using AI applications or enterprises adopting agentic AI.

Eliminating the “Security vs. Speed” Dilemma

The gap between AI expectations and reality is widening; a recent survey revealed that only 18% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders feel completely confident that their current team and budget can meet the intensifying performance, resilience, and security demands of the AI era. Enterprises want to increase their use of AI, but are often forced into trade-offs between security and user experience due to outdated security tools or an over-reliance on inadequate network infrastructure. These trade-offs may have significant consequences, as enterprises stall their AI adoption over heightened security concerns, or bypass AI traffic from inspection, or find their users working around critical security controls to avoid performance degradation.

By leveraging the power of Netskope NewEdge—the carrier-grade private cloud that underpins the Netskope One platform for delivery of security, networking, analytics, and AI services—customers can avoid these trade-offs. As a set of capabilities within NewEdge, AI Fast Path techniques enable greater performance and efficiency for even the most demanding AI applications. Specific benefits include:

• Faster inference results for enterprise users from prompt to response, minimizing “time-to-first-token” (TTFT) for conversational AI.
• Agentic AI optimization by accelerating complex, multi-prompt agentic workflows with the high-speed processing required for rapid, iterative AI subtasks.
• Optimization of Large Language Model (LLM) performance when accessing large volumes of distributed data (for example, via Model Context Protocol gateways).
• Support for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by accelerating the connectivity between LLMs and external data sources for higher quality, real-time outputs.

“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. “Netskope is recognized as a market leader for how we combine security strengths with network performance at the level of, and in some cases even improved over, direct-to-net for virtually any user on the path. That includes optimizing the user experience for business-critical AI. We’re pleased to help customers meet their need for AI speed without adding unnecessary risks.”

Netskope Continues NewEdge Expansion

Unlike vendors that rely on public clouds and third-party providers, Netskope maintains direct control over its data center infrastructure, with full compute at the edge and security services available in every region—backed by industry-leading service level agreements (SLA) for availability, traffic processing, and security efficacy. Netskope NewEdge sets a modern standard for security and networking, designed to address customer requirements for world-class coverage, end-to-end performance, and resilience for business continuity against “black swan” events such as natural disasters and cable cuts. NewEdge is architected to be scalable, with the ability to quickly add data centers and increase capacity, helping to ensure that Netskope One platform services are always on and highly performant.

AI Fast Path joins Netskope’s continuously expanding NewEdge footprint and leading network capabilities, including:

• A global footprint of more than 120 data centers in more than 75 regions worldwide, with every location capable of providing full compute and running a complete SASE stack at the edge for users, sites or devices to accelerate the on-ramping of traffic to NewEdge and taking advantage of Netskope services, including for Security Service Edge (SSE), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and AI security.
• The extensive peering and interconnection of NewEdge with more than 11,000 network adjacencies today (including more than 1,000 new adjacencies added in the past 12 months) to more than 750 unique autonomous system numbers (ASN), including some of the top AI destinations such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. This peering and interconnection eliminates traffic hops or reliance on transit providers, so there is a fast direct path from NewEdge to these destinations.
• Innovative technology such as NewEdge Route Control which uses rich telemetry data collected through extensive network and application performance monitoring. Route control makes tens of thousands of route changes per day identifying the fastest path to AI destinations, as well as bolstering resilience by routing around internet congestion or ISP connectivity issues.
  

For more information on how Netskope eliminates trade-offs between security and performance for the AI era, visit the Netskope NewEdge Network page on Netskope.com.

About Netskope
Netskope (NASDAQ: NTSK), a leader in modern security and networking for the cloud and AI era, addresses the needs of both security and networking teams by providing optimized access and real-time, context-based security for people, devices, and data anywhere they go. Thousands of customers, including more than 30% of the Fortune 100, trust the Netskope One platform, its Zero Trust Engine, and its powerful NewEdge network to reduce risk and gain full visibility and control over cloud, AI, SaaS, web, and private applications—providing security and accelerating performance without trade-offs.

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