Netskope Launches Advanced Data Lineage Tool for AI Governance and Compliance

Netskope Unveils Data Lineage Tool for AI Governance

Netskope has announced a new data lineage product designed to provide organizations with visibility and analytics regarding how data is created, moved, and used across cloud services, networks, and devices.

Introducing Netskope One Data Lineage

The product, Netskope One Data Lineage, is part of the Netskope One platform. It tracks the provenance and lifecycle of information as it is stored, transmitted, and accessed by users and systems. This launch addresses the growing demand for stronger governance as companies deploy AI tools and AI agents.

The Importance of Data Lineage

Data lineage provides an audit trail for compliance, internal investigations, and data policy enforcement. Many security teams already use data loss prevention tools to identify and control sensitive information, but older approaches struggle to correlate activity across sources and interactions, limiting visibility into how data spreads inside and outside an organization.

Tracking Data Movement

Netskope One Data Lineage tracks and visualizes the movement of sensitive data across an organization, including where it originates, how it moves, and who uses and accesses it. It also records how information propagates and changes over time.

This product keeps policy controls attached to data as it is extracted and reformatted into different document types and file formats. This addresses a common governance challenge: the same content can reappear in new files and locations during day-to-day work.

Historical Timeline and Use Cases

The service provides a historical timeline for documents and files, allowing security and IT teams to see who accessed a file, how it travelled across systems, and how it changed after being copied or edited.

Netskope groups the feature set into three use cases:

Retrospective investigations after data exfiltration or inappropriate access.
Identifying risky user behaviour that could indicate insider threats.
Adjusting and enforcing access policies based on observed data flows.

Compliance Focus

Netskope is positioning data lineage as both a compliance tool and a security control. Audit trails have become a core requirement as privacy and data protection rules expand. Many companies need evidence for internal governance policies, contractual obligations, and industry standards.

The co-founder and CTO of Netskope stated that full context is essential for modern data security, particularly where AI tools are in use. “Organizations need the full context of how data is moving across the digital environment, along with the ability to prevent unauthorized access and use of it, and to prove compliance with increasingly rigorous data protection regulations,” they emphasized.

Market Context

AI governance is becoming a priority for security and risk teams. Many organizations want to use internal data in AI-driven workflows while limiting exposure of confidential information and meeting regulatory expectations. This has increased interest in controls that track where data resides and how it is used.

A research director noted that the volume of sensitive information is growing as content is created, copied, and shared across tools and teams. “Successfully implementing AI requires trust in the data that fuels it,” they added. Strict governance of an organization’s data, along with verifiable audit trails, can assure that only the right people and devices have access to appropriate information.