Fast-Growing SaaS Company Protects Two New Data Centers with Illumio

Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the fastest growing areas in the technology industry and by its very nature is an omnivorous consumer of computing capacity and capabilities. One of the largest and fastest-growing players in the world needed to deploy two new data centers in two countries in support of customer and geographic growth plans. Facing rapid growth and increasing east/west data center traffic, they needed a solution that would protect customer data and scale into the future – a requirement that would be hard to meet with network segmentation and expensive with high-capacity data center firewalls in every rack. They were also looking for a way to more cost effectively segment while maintaining their agile software development culture. From the drawing board to deployment, the company needed to roll out and secure the new data centers in less than six months with live customer data while meeting stringent internal and regional security and compliance requirements.

Illumio Core (formerly ASP) was selected and deployed to protect 9,000 workloads across the two new data centers in two countries to meet deadlines and security requirements. The solution was aggressively tested and rolled out by the customer’s cross-functional team with key stakeholders from the application development, infrastructure, and security teams all working in concert. Unlike other available data center firewall, network segmentation, or micro-segmentation solutions, Illumio adaptive segmentation capabilities provided:

• Scalable and flexible segmentation between individual customer environments.
• A single segmentation solution for bare-metal, virtualized, on-premises, and cloud workloads.
• Application segmentation with fine-grained control between application tiers.
• Segmentation between and within production and development environments.
• Regionally specific segmentation policy to meet local regulations.

A key benefit of Illumio Core has been the ability to allow the company to move to a flatter network architecture that eliminated the use of fine-grained VLANs, network switch ACLs, and expensive high-capacity data center firewalls in every rack for security segmentation. This allowed the company to reduce costs and led to a simplified and faster network architecture that doesn’t stand in the way of application deployments or delivery. During the Illumio rollout, the team used Illumination capabilities to model, test, and visualize the impact of policy and alignment with compliance requirements.

• Shifted from a “high-capacity firewall in every rack” strategy to an adaptive segmentation approach for data center control and protection.
• Eliminated $10M+ in potential high-capacity data center firewall acquisition costs for the new environments.
• Reduced ~95 percent of potential firewall rules and complexity from over 15,000 to 40 Illumio policies.
• Simplified security policy by eliminating the need to specify IP addresses in a dynamic environment.
• Achieved goals of a simplified, fast, flat network architecture.
• Improved visibility across environments for application and compliance teams.
• Gained integration with internal automation, orchestration, and monitoring tools.