3 Highlights From Illumio at Black Hat 2023

Black Hat 2023 has come to an end with an estimated 20,000 people attending the conference at Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. We enjoyed meeting everyone who stopped by Illumio’s booth to learn more about Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation.  

As we reflect on this year’s conference, we’re excited to share these 3 highlights from our time there.

Watch the video below for a brief recap of this year's Black Hat!

1. Hearing from Microsoft Azure Firewall experts

If you visited Illumio’s booth at Black Hat, you might’ve heard us speaking with our Microsoft Azure partners about Illumio for Microsoft Azure Firewall. The new integration helps Azure customers enforce Zero Trust Segmentation and go beyond network and application filtering.  

Learn more about Illumio for Microsoft Azure Firewall in this article.  

We featured two sessions in our booth about this new offering:

• ‍The Future of Network Security in the Cloud: A fireside chat with Gopikrishna Kanna, Head of Products for Azure Firewall and Firewall Manager at Microsoft. Hosted by Raghu Nandakumara, Senior Director of Industry Solutions at Illumio.‍

• Secure Your Azure Network Infrastructure with Zero Trust and Cloud-Native Network Security: A technical presentation and demo from Microsoft's Bruce Cosden, Azure Networking Global Black Belt, and Kevin Lopez, Americas Sales Director for Azure Advanced Networking Global Black Belt. Hosted by Jeff Stauffer, Technical Product Manager at Illumio.

Raghu Nandakumara, Senior Director of Industry Solutions at Illumio, shared the significance of Illumio’s new integration with Microsoft Azure Firewall: “In partnership with a fairly household name like Microsoft, we’re accelerating the adoption of Azure for their customers by helping them build even better security on the Azure Firewall. If you heard Gopikrishna Kanna from Microsoft speak, he said he’s excited about this partnership because it makes it really easy for Azure customers to get better visibility about what’s going on in their Azure environment, building the right policies, and achieve perfection. It’s about doing those really important things easily and quickly.”

2. Learning why we’re still losing to ransomware – and how to prepare for inevitable breaches

We were excited for Illumio Senior Director of Cybersecurity Strategy and former child hacker Paul Dant to present his speaking sessions, Thirty Years of Arguing with Adults, at this year’s Black Hat.  

Paul shared funny stories from his childhood of hacking that eerily predict the treacherous security landscape of today. These stories helped show why we’re still chasing ransomware and struggling to keep ahead of bad actors. The audience left with insight into how they can start proactively solving security problems – instead of just treading water – and prepare their organizations for inevitable breaches.

3. Showing how the Illumio ZTS Platform works

Illumio’s booth was busy throughout the 2-day event with our Zero Trust Segmentation experts providing demos of Illumio’s platform.  

If you want to learn more about Illumio ZTS, contact us today for a free consultation and demo.

Visibility was a hot topic with visitors – organizations are more interested than ever in knowing exactly what’s happening inside their environments.  

Paul Dant commented on his experience talking to visitors about visibility: “Without understanding how systems in the environment are communicating, you can’t possibly protect them. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about visibility that takes things down to the level of how systems are communicating with each other compared to the much larger block diagrams of how networks are communicating with each other.”

The Illumio ZTS Platform offers application dependency mapping to help security teams see risk by visualizing all communication and traffic between workloads and devices across the entire hybrid attack surface. This ensures teams can see vulnerabilities, take action to quickly close risky ports, and set security policy that will proactively isolate high-value assets or reactively isolate compromised systems during an active attack to stop the spread of ransomware and breaches.  

If you want to learn more about Illumio ZTS, contact us today for a free consultation and demo.