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Shield360 › Compare › Zscaler and Netskope

Shield360 beside Zscaler and Netskope

Zscaler and Netskope are security service edge (SSE) platforms: cloud services that sit inline on the network path, decrypt traffic and apply web, SaaS and data protection policy, now including dedicated AI security products. Shield360 is not an SSE and does not try to replace one. It is an AI-specific layer that works without intercepting TLS, and is designed to run alongside the SSE you already have.

As of October 2026, from each vendor's own public pages. Products change, so check with the vendor.

01 · In short

Where each one fits

The SSE owns the network path.
Shield360 owns the AI record.

Keep your SSE for

Web and SaaS security for all traffic, TLS inspection, AI app risk ratings and access policy for every user, browser isolation, and inline DLP across everything that reaches the network. Both vendors now also sell AI-specific guardrails, gateways and discovery.

Add Shield360 for

One AI policy across the browser, six coding agents, an AI proxy and an MCP gateway; personal AI accounts told apart from company seats on each computer; AI spend per person, seat and key; and control status and signed evidence for the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001 and NIST AI RMF, all from the same record.

How they fit

Shield360's AI proxy forwards its upstream calls through an existing egress proxy (it honors HTTPS_PROXY), so AI API traffic still leaves through your SSE. Both send security events to the same SIEM.

02 · Side by side

From each vendor's own pages

Question by question.

✓ the vendor's own page states it Partial covered in part; the note says how Not stated the pages we read do not say; ask the vendor

Both SSE vendors are adding AI features quickly, and several were announced in 2026 with staged availability; the notes say where a vendor's page marks something as announced, in preview or rolling out. Netskope renamed its AI suite Netskope Skylight in September 2026.

QuestionZscalerNetskopeShield360
What it isCloud security service inline on the network path, across 160+ data centers; AI Protect familyCloud security service on its NewEdge network; Netskope Skylight AI security suiteAI governance, security and cost layer: browser extension, collector, AI proxy, coding-agent hooks, MCP gateway
How it sees AI trafficInline, with TLS decryption; traffic forwarded by Client Connector, tunnels or proxySteered by the Netskope Client, tunnels or explicit proxy; steered traffic decrypted by defaultNo TLS interception and no root certificate: in the browser, inside the coding agent, or at a proxy addressed by base URL
Employee access to AI apps✓ Risk classifications for 3,500+ AI tools; allow, block, isolate or caution✓ Risk scores for 370+ genAI apps; real-time coaching or redirect to sanctioned apps✓ Extension in managed Chrome and Edge: prompts and file uploads checked on eleven AI chat sites and on AI sites you add (warn, mask or block per kind of data); other listed AI sites allowed, warned about or blocked
Sensitive data in prompts✓ Inline DLP on prompts; isolation can disable cut, paste and download✓ Inline and API-based DLP; controls on upload, download, copy and print✓ Warn, mask or block per kind of data, in the browser, AI proxy and coding agents
Personal versus company AI accountsNot stated✓ Policies for personal versus corporate app instances✓ Personal Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Copilot plans told apart from company seats
Coding agentsPartial Endpoint AI Security names Claude Code and Codex, and IDE extensions in VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf; rolling out as of October 2026Partial Client AI Discovery detects Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and GitHub Copilot; DLP hook for Claude Code under Claude Enterprise; Agent Action Control announced✓ Hooks in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf and GitHub Copilot CLI: warn or block sensitive data, secret-file reads and risky sequences; no masking
MCP and AI agents✓ AI Gateway brokers MCP and A2A traffic with least-privilege access; further agent features announced June 2026✓ Agentic Broker: visibility and control over MCP transactions✓ MCP gateway: a token per agent, deny-by-default grants that can expire, denied calls recorded
AI applications you build✓ AI Guard for Apps: prompt injection, jailbreaks, DLP; AI red teaming✓ AI Guardrails against prompt injection and jailbreaks; AI Red TeamingPartial Guard check API; heuristic prompt-injection detection; templated, model-generated and multi-turn red-team passes on agent tests
AI spendNot statedPartial AI Gateway dashboard shows input and output tokens per provider for traffic through the gateway✓ Seats and per-token use per person, machine, tool, model and key; vendor bills beside the estimate
AI compliance frameworksPartial AI Asset Management cites NIST AI RMF 600-1 and the EU AI Act for compliance reportingPartial Guardrail detections mapped to MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs✓ Control status for EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF, OWASP Agentic; signed evidence packages
SIEM✓ Nanolog Streaming Service and Cloud NSS✓ Log Streaming; Cloud Exchange Log Shipper✓ OCSF to Splunk, Sentinel, Datadog, Elastic, S3, syslog over TLS or a signed webhook
Run in your own environmentPartial Private and Virtual Service Edges in your data center, co-managed with ZscalerPartial AI Gateway in your VPC or on-premises; on-premises dataplane appliance✓ The whole platform, self-hosted with Docker Compose

As of October 2026. Information about other vendors comes from their own public pages, listed under Sources, as read on 14 October 2026. Products change, and a feature a vendor's pages do not mention may still exist, so check with the vendor. Product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to identify their products; no endorsement or affiliation is implied. If something here about your product is wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

03 · Together

Running both

Nothing to rip out.
Nothing to re-route.

No second TLS interceptor

Shield360 never terminates TLS, so it does not compete with the SSE's decryption and needs no exceptions in it. The extension reads the prompt in the page; the hooks read it in the agent.

The AI proxy chains to your egress

Applications point their SDK base URL at Shield360's AI proxy. The proxy honors HTTPS_PROXY, so its calls to OpenAI, Anthropic and other providers go out through the explicit proxy your SSE already provides.

Two views of the same use

The SSE sees the network; Shield360 sees the person, the computer, the coding agent, the account plan and the bill. Both send events to the same SIEM, Shield360's as OCSF.

04 · Limits

What Shield360 does not do

What Shield360
does not do.

  • It is not an SSE, SWG or CASB. It does not secure non-AI web or SaaS traffic, and has no browser isolation.
  • It does not intercept TLS. AI use outside the extension, the AI proxy, a coding-agent hook or the MCP gateway is still observed and attributed, but not blocked.
  • The browser extension runs in managed Chrome and Edge; it checks prompts and file uploads on eleven AI chat sites and on AI sites you add, and allows, warns or blocks other listed AI sites.
  • The AI proxy is an API gateway reached by base URL, not a forward proxy: it does not accept CONNECT and cannot be set as a browser's proxy.
  • It does not ingest Zscaler or Netskope logs today.

05 · Sources

Read 14 October 2026

Sources.

Based on each vendor's public documentation as of October 2026; products change, so check with the vendor. Shield360 statements were checked against the product's documentation and source code as deployed in production on 15 October 2026.

Keep the SSE. Add the AI record.

A call starts from your current Zscaler or Netskope set-up and shows where Shield360 would sit beside it, without a second certificate or a change to how traffic is steered.

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