Illumio Named Among Notable Vendors in the Forrester Microsegmentation Landscape, Q2 2024

Analyst Relations Director

April 17, 2024

23 min. read

As a strategy based on the concept of “never trust, always verify,” Zero Trust is a means to mitigating risk and strengthening cybersecurity defenses. It continues to increase in relevance as enterprises move away from the traditional approaches of perimeter-based network security due to proliferation of remote and hybrid work, and an almost exponential adoption of cloud services.

Forrester’s recently published Microsegmentation Solutions Landscape, Q2 2024 reinforces these assertions, stating: “You can use microsegmentation solutions to secure critical and important resources, defend against ransomware, and achieve compliance imperatives.”

Illumio was recognized by Forrester in the new Microsegmentation Solutions Landscape, Q2 2024 amongst the notable microsegmentation solutions vendors. We are confident that the Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) Platform closely aligns with all core and extended use cases as defined in the research, providing granular protection that can enable secure operations wherever employees may be – in the office, remotely, or in the cloud.

There’s no Zero Trust without microsegmentation

Forrester sees microsegmentation, also known as Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS), as “one of the first true Zero Trust technologies” that has since evolved into an established market.

When implementing microsegmentation platforms like Illumio’s as part of a Zero Trust strategy, organizations can achieve a unified view over workloads and communications across their hybrid environments while benefitting from a single source of truth, including sources of metadata and context. This enables teams to move from a siloed approach to Zero Trust security to a broader, more cohesive view over the entire organization’s security posture.

Microsegmentation solutions can address three of the most significant challenges facing today’s dynamic enterprise environments. These include:

Restricting lateral movement within networks
Providing granular access down to the workload level

Securing workloads across diverse environments.

According to the Forrester research, “Organizations are finally getting serious about Zero Trust. Some, proactively, are implementing microsegmentation as part of a Zero Trust strategy or initiative. Others are implementing it because they got hit by ransomware and are trying to avoid it again. But all of them are doing Zero Trust with microsegmentation.”

How Illumio aligns with microsegmentation use cases

By providing rapid time to value, we believe Illumio’s ZTS platform is fully capable of delivering upon the three core use cases defined by Forrester in its Microsegmentation Landscape, Q2 2024 research.

The following have been identified by the research firm as the ones that buyers are most frequently trying to solve for when evaluating microsegmentation vendors, and here we outline how we believe Illumio addresses each:

Apply Zero Trust: The Illumio ZTS Platform maintains continuous, risk-based verification, enforces least-privileged access, and enables organizations to gain comprehensive security monitoring across the hybrid environment. maintains continuous, risk-based verification, enforces least-privileged access, and enables organizations to gain comprehensive security monitoring across the hybrid environment.

Defend against ransomware: The Illumio ZTS Platform can contain ransomware in minutes by stopping the spread of an attack once it enters the network environment. It identifies areas of high risk and ensures long-term protection of digital assets, ultimately preserving the resiliency of the organization.

Provide traffic flow visibility: The Illumio ZTS Platform helps reduce risk by providing real-time visibility and context around traffic flows while limiting interactions between servers to protect high-value applications. limiting interactions between servers to protect high-value applications.

Additionally, thanks to the breadth and depth of the Illumio ZTS Platform, we believe our solution delivers all of the extended use cases defined by Forrester in the research:

Secure private clouds and public cloud workloads: Illumio offers real-time visibility into hybrid, multi-cloud environments to see and secure network exposure, automates security policy at the workload regardless of the underlying environment, and applies orchestrated, consistent security across your hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Secure healthcare environments: Illumio can map and segment communication amongst traditional IT data center and clouds as well as devices on IoMT and OT networks in healthcare organizations, such as admin systems, bedside carts, X-rays, etc. As a result, healthcare providers can protect critical assets and stop malicious actors from reaching critical systems and data, guarding against a major operational failure or loss of patient and financial data.

Secure OT environments: Illumio is used by organizations in the manufacturing, transport, energy, and healthcare sectors to protect their OT environments. Being able to map all interconnections between systems highlights the potential threats of open high-risk ports that should be restricted in the OT world. Being able to restrict the movement of an attacker protects an industrial control system from the impact of ransomware. The flexibility of Illumio’s platform means that an organization can react quicker to reduce the impact of an attack.

Isolate IoT devices: For individual, standalone IoT systems like bank ATMs, train ticket machines, oil valves, etc., Illumio provides defense-in-depth by creating a micro-perimeter that not only protects the device from external attack but also protects the wider network from a physical attack. Where systems are deployed in remote locations, an attack vector could be to physically connect to the device and then inject malware into the infrastructure – Illumio stops this from happening.

Want to learn more about the Illumio ZTS Platform?