How to Contain Breaches and Regain Control in Your Multi-Cloud Environment

Cloud adoption was supposed to make everything faster. It also made things a whole lot fuzzier.

Today, most organizations live in a multi-cloud world. They’ve got workloads in AWS, Azure, OCI, and sometimes all three. Each platform brings its own way of managing resources, securing workloads, and tagging assets.  

But none of these tools were built to work together. That’s a problem.

Security teams are forced to cobble together protections using cloud-native tools that don’t speak the same language. The result is major visibility gaps, policy silos, and missed risks. When attackers slip through the cracks — which they always do — they can quickly spread unchecked.

It’s not a lack of security tools. It’s a lack of breach containment. And that’s where Illumio comes in.

See, segment, and contain cloud breaches

At Illumio, we help organizations move beyond the limitations of prevention tools. Our breach containment platform gives you the visibility and control to see everything and contain anything across your hybrid, multi-cloud environments.

What does that look like in practice?

Let’s say you have workloads running in AWS, containers spinning up in Azure, and managed databases living in OCI. Each of those environments has different tagging systems, policies, and telemetry formats. Illumio brings all of it into a single policy model, one that works not only across clouds, but also on-premises and at the endpoint.

We collect flow telemetry and metadata from each cloud provider, map it to a unified label-based framework, and give you an accurate, real-time view of how workloads are communicating.  

From there, you can segment traffic based on business logic, not network constructs, and stop lateral movement before it starts.

Our cloud security architecture

Here’s how we make multi-cloud security consistent and scalable.

We start by collecting flow data from cloud-native sources. Think VPC flow logs in AWS or NSG flow logs in Azure. This data tells us which resources are talking to each other, when, and how often.

At the same time, we pull in object metadata, including tags, labels, and instance details, from each cloud. These help define the “who” and “what” behind those flows. Then we map that information into Illumio’s label-based policy model, creating a shared language for security across environments.

From there, everything becomes visible. And once it’s visible, it becomes enforceable with segmentation. Watch a demo of this process:

But visibility alone isn’t enough when you’re managing thousands of resources and millions of connections. That’s where Illumio Insights can help.  

Insights automatically surfaces the riskiest connections and misconfigurations, helping security teams prioritize what matters most. If a workload is overly exposed to the internet, talking to an unmanaged asset, or communicating in unexpected ways, Insights flags it fast.  

Instead of drowning in noise, you get a clear view of what needs attention and why.

With this information, you can then write segmentation policies that isolate environments, lock down east-west traffic, and prevent workloads from communicating in ways they shouldn’t, no matter where they live. And that same policy model works in your on-premises data center and on your endpoints.

Legacy cloud security tools aren’t working

Most cloud security approaches still rely on the same old model: try to keep threats out, and hope you find the ones that sneak in.  

Prevention-first thinking worked when your perimeter was a physical firewall around a data center. But in the cloud, there’s no perimeter — only an ever-expanding sprawl of ephemeral resources.

Cloud providers offer native security controls, but they’re siloed by design. AWS Security Groups work in AWS. Azure NSGs work in Azure. Nothing gives you a unified picture of how your workloads communicate, let alone a way to control it across environments.

This fragmentation is what attackers exploit. If you can’t see how things connect, you can’t stop a breach from moving laterally once it’s inside. That’s how a small compromise becomes a major incident.

Breach containment is the future of cloud security

The fact is that you can’t detect everything, and you won’t stop every attack at your network perimeter. That’s why visibility and segmentation matter so much — and why context is key.

With Illumio, if a workload in Azure gets compromised, you can contain the blast radius before it spreads to your AWS-hosted apps. And with Insights constantly analyzing flow patterns and exposure levels, you’ll know where those risks are building up long before an attacker can take advantage.

You don’t need to write custom rules in each cloud, manually track down dependencies, or hope your detection tools find the threat in time. You just enforce policy everywhere based on business context, not IPs or cloud zones, and use Insights to guide your next move.

That’s the power of Illumio. It doesn’t replace prevention. It completes it.

Case study: how Ixom secured its multi-cloud environment with Illumio

Ixom is a global leader in chemical manufacturing. Like many organizations, it operates in a hybrid environment where some resources are on-premises and others are in the cloud.

Before Illumio, it struggled with visibility and segmentation across their infrastructure. Once it deployed our platform, it could:

• Visualize application dependencies across environments
• Enforce segmentation policy consistently, without relying on native controls
• Contain breaches quickly and with minimal manual effort

Cloud complexity is inevitable. Catastrophic breaches don’t have to be.

The move to the cloud isn’t slowing down — and neither are attackers. But you don’t have to live with blind spots or hope that detection tools catch everything in time.

With Illumio, you get a single source of truth for cloud workload connectivity and a single way to enforce policy across any environment. That’s how you stop lateral movement, contain inevitable breaches, and regain control of your cloud security.

Ready to move from reactive cloud security to proactive breach containment? Download The Cloud Resilience Playbook today to learn how.