The cloud broke DLP's old model. When data lived in a handful of on-prem systems, you could integrate with each. When it lives in hundreds of SaaS apps — and a new one onboards every week — building a bespoke DLP connector per app is a treadmill no vendor can win.
Netskope, Inc.'s US11575735B2, “Cloud application-agnostic data loss prevention (DLP)” (issued February 7, 2023; CPC H04L 67/10 — cloud/distributed computing, and G06F 9/547 — remote procedure call/RPC), describes DLP that is agnostic to the specific cloud application. Read it at US11575735B2.
Mechanically, the approach inspects and enforces policy at a layer common across cloud apps — the API and traffic patterns they share — rather than encoding rules per application. One policy engine covers the long tail of SaaS, including apps the vendor never specifically built for, because it reasons about cloud data movement generically.
Why this is a business story: app-agnostic coverage is the scalability argument at the heart of the cloud-access-security-broker (CASB) and SASE pitch, and it is central to Netskope's positioning as it moved toward the public markets. The competitive question every buyer asks — how many of my SaaS apps does this actually cover? — is answered by exactly this kind of generic enforcement. Netskope, Zscaler, and Palo Alto all filed heavily in cloud DLP in this window, signaling a high-stakes feature race.
The grounded read: app-agnostic DLP escapes the per-app integration treadmill by enforcing policy at the layer cloud apps share. Netskope's 2023 grant names that approach — the scalability claim underpinning the modern CASB and SASE pitch.