Applications
Illumio and Netskope announce zero trust partnership
Mumbai – Illumio, Inc., the Zero Trust Segmentation company, and Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today announced a Zero Trust partnership that brings together the power of Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to protect against breaches and build cyber resilience. The new partnership combines Illumio ZTS with Netskope ZTNA Next via the Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) platform to enable network and security teams to create Zero Trust policies that consistently secure access at an organization’s perimeter and within its hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure.
In its recommended Zero Trust Architecture, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), prescribes three primary Zero Trust enforcement points: identity, network access, and workload segmentation, with Zero Trust Network Access implemented at the organization’s boundary, and Zero Trust Segmentation implemented at the destination workloads. Together, Illumio ZTS and Netskope ZTNA Next share context to ensure consistent Zero Trust security at the perimeter and within an organization’s network to reduce the risk from cyberattacks. Key benefits include:
1 Full visibility across hybrid environments: By combining application-to-application and risk-based visibility from Illumio ZTS with the user-to-application-based visibility in Netskope ZTNA Next, organizations gain a consistent, real-time view of user-to-application and application-to-application traffic, enabling them to better understand risk end-to-end.
2 Protection for end users from non-compliant workloads: Combined visibility between platforms enables security teams to define Netskope policy to block access between users and potentially compromised workloads, or workloads in segmented environments, increasing resilience across the organization.
3 Dynamic ZTNA policy: Netskope’s security policies are automatically updated based on metadata from Illumio, eliminating the need to rewrite rules as workload attributes change, ensuring users and critical applications are always protected and allowing organizations to scale their Zero Trust architecture.
With ransomware attacks on the rise and IBM data showing the cost of breaches increasing to $4.45 million, organisations are turning towards Zero Trust solutions to strengthen resilience. ZTNA is already widely adopted with Gartner seeing “strong adoption among large organizations and midmarket organizations.” Adoption of microsegmentation is also expected to rise rapidly; Gartner predicts that “by 2026, 60 percent of enterprises working toward Zero Trust architecture will use more than one deployment form of microsegmentation, up from less than 5% in 2023.”
“Businesses today are under pressure to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right online resources, and that requires applying zero trust principles to every interaction with those resources. Our partnership with Illumio ensures that the Netskope One platform learns additional, needed context around private workload posture to help inform and reinforce the security with which private applications and workloads are accessed,” said Netskope VP of Technology Alliances David Willis.
“Organizations need their Zero Trust technologies to share context so that they have the same view of the environment they’re protecting and can update policies accordingly,” said Illumio chief product officer Mario Espinoza. “That’s exactly what the Illumio and Netskope integration does – Illumio provides Netskope with the needed context to prevent remote users from accessing compromised workloads, while also protecting potentially non-compliant internal workloads from remote access, stopping breaches from spreading. Essentially, we are making it easier than ever for organizations to implement Zero Trust across their hybrid environments to strengthen resilience.”
Applications
With 57 per cent single new users, Ashley Madison rebrands as discreet dating platform
Platform says majority of new members now identify as single
INDIA: Ashley Madison is shedding the “married-dating” label that defined it for two decades, repositioning itself as a platform for discreet dating in what it calls the post-social media age.
The rebrand, unveiled in India on 27 February, 2026, marks a structural shift in business model and identity. Once synonymous with married dating, the company now describes itself as the “premier destination for discreet dating” under a new tagline: Where Desire Meets Discretion.
The pivot is data-driven. Internal figures show that 57 per cent of global sign-ups between 1 January and 31 December, 2025 identified as single: a notable departure from the platform’s married core. The company argues that its community has already evolved beyond its original positioning.
“In an age where our lives have been constantly put on public display, privacy has become the new luxury,” said Ashley Madison chief strategy officer Paul Keable. He framed the platform’s offering as “ethical discretion” for singles, separated, divorced and non-monogamous users seeking private connections.
The shift also taps into wider digital fatigue. A global survey conducted by YouGov for Ashley Madison, covering 13,071 adults across Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US, found mounting discomfort with hyper-public online lives.
Among dating app users, 30 per cent cited constant swiping and messaging as a source of fatigue, while 24 per cent pointed to pressure to curate public-facing profiles and early personal disclosure. Some 27 per cent said fears of screenshots or information being shared contributed to exhaustion; an equal share cited unwanted attention.
The retreat from oversharing appears broader. According to the survey, 46 per cent of adults actively try to keep most aspects of their life private online. Only 8 per cent feel comfortable sharing most aspects publicly, while 35 per cent say they are becoming more selective about what they disclose.
Ashley Madison is betting that this cultural recalibration towards controlled visibility can be monetised. By doubling down on privacy infrastructure and reframing itself around discretion rather than infidelity, the company is attempting to convert reputational baggage into a premium proposition.
