Security leaders say that zero trust is a good solution for gaining visibility and easy deployment of micro and macro segmentation along with threat controls
While every industry has deployed a whole wide array of security policies, processes, and products in continuous attempts to protect the organization, in the current situation, the possibility of malicious activities occurring inside the network has increased at a much higher rate. This is mainly due to the porous network perimeter and the remote working model of the new normal.
Experienced security leaders believe that strength lies in simplicity. Zero trust is the concept where no traffic is trusted- without explicit authorization from a security policy. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the application and development of smart policies to prevent unwanted behavior.
CISOs prefer zero trust as it prevents malicious and unwanted lateral movement by inspecting closely all the East-West traffic occurring in the data center. It ensures to apply policies that prevent bad actors from shifting around, gaining unacceptable access to data and escalating privileges.
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Deploying zero trust
CIOs say that IT organizations have tried to achieve zero trust via agent-based micro-segmentation and edge firewalls orchestrators. These solutions have had effective and useful characteristics and also serious challenges. Implementing distributed internal firewalls helps blend the best and most required attributes of both solutions, which results in a superior measure.
Distributed internal firewalls help enterprises to fast track their journey to zero trust. These firewalls act as the foundation for the journey and serve the required features like advanced analytics, full topology visibility, and streamlined security architecture.
Macro segmentation of network
CIOs prefer to use the distributed internal firewall for segmentation of the network at a coarse level, thus securing and isolating zones from one another, including zones like production, test, and development.
This step helps prevent malicious insiders and attackers from laterally moving between zones. It eliminates the need to redesign the network or require the network to address the changes. Organizations can streamline security architecture and boost the time-to-value.
Visibility into the network topology
Security leaders say that it was difficult for enterprises to comprehensively understand the applications, relevant workloads, and micro services in the past. In the current scenario, the distributed internal firewall provides complete application topology visibility throughout the data center.
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Visibility into the application traffic and behavior flow entails that organizations can effectively control all workloads and applications. It provides insights that organizations will need in the later stages of the journey.
Micro segmenting a popular application
CIOs say that with full visibility, organizations can start the process of decreasing the attack surface. It includes isolation of critical application away from data center assets, eliminating lateral movement, and enabling application- and user-specific access controls. Security leaders believe that the best place to start the process is from an application that is critical to business and is also well-documented and well understood.
A distributed internal firewall analyzes the traffic and deploys user group-specific security regulations. It develops security policy recommendations built on observed traffic behavior. The solution ensures policy consistency across the network, including physical servers, containers, public cloud services, and VMs.
