How Illumio Stops Ransomware Lateral Movement in Hybrid Multi-Cloud Environments

In March 2019, a Tuesday morning started like any other for Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s largest aluminum manufacturers, until ransomware brought its systems to a standstill.

Overnight, attackers encrypted thousands of servers and PCs across the company’s global network. This forced plants in multiple countries to shut down digital systems and switch to manual operations while IT teams fought to contain the damage and rebuild.

It was a stark reminder that once ransomware slips past the perimeter, it can rapidly disrupt operations at global scale.

Unfortunately, this story is becoming the rule and not the exception.

In today’s complex hybrid multi-cloud environments, ransomware infiltrates and spreads quickly. That’s why lateral movement is now the most dangerous phase of a cyberattack.  

And it’s why organizations need more than prevention. They need breach containment, attack path visibility, and a way to stop ransomware in real time.

In this post, you’ll see how Illumio shines a light on hidden attack paths and contains breaches, stopping ransomware’s lateral spread before it can bring your hybrid multi-cloud to a halt.

The core problem with ransomware: lateral movement

Modern ransomware succeeds by exploiting lateral movement in hybrid IT.  

Attackers don’t just breach one machine and stay there. They pivot across cloud workloads, virtual machines, and endpoints, seeking out high-value targets and amplifying damage.

This movement happens internally — east-west across the network — and it’s often invisible to traditional security tools focused on perimeter defenses.  

That’s what makes ransomware in hybrid environments so dangerous. Once the attacker is inside, they can operate almost undetected.

Hybrid infrastructure complicates this further. Applications now span on-premises data centers, public clouds, container clusters, and SaaS integrations.  

Workloads constantly change. Traffic flows are dynamic and ephemeral. Traditional prevention and detection tools simply weren’t built for this level of complexity.

To prevent ransomware spread, organizations must rethink how they approach detection and response. Fine-grained visibility is the foundation of hybrid IT ransomware prevention.

Why detection alone isn’t enough to stop ransomware attacks

Too often, security teams rely on detection tools that send alerts after damage has already begun.  

By the time a traditional system detects an anomaly, ransomware may have already encrypted systems, deleted backups, or gained control of admin credentials.

The key metric here is speed. Mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) are critical for ransomware containment. But many SOC teams still have to take hours or even days to understand how an attacker moved through the environment.

That lag is what turns an isolated incident into a business-wide crisis.

What organizations need instead is a platform that lets them:

• See every possible attack path before it’s exploited. ‍
• Detect malicious movement across cloud and data center workloads in real time. ‍
• Act immediately to isolate compromised systems and prevent further spread.

Illumio stops ransomware before it spreads

Stopping ransomware in today’s hybrid multi-cloud environments won’t get done with more alerts. You need to be able to see where attackers are going in real time and stop them from spreading.

That’s exactly what Illumio delivers. The Illumio platform combines Illumio Insights for cloud detection and response (CDR) with Illumio Segmentation for real-time breach containment and lateral movement protection.

Together, these solutions give security teams the visibility, control, and agility to detect ransomware behavior early, isolate risky workloads instantly, and enforce segmentation policies that stop future spread.

While traditional tools rely on static rules or after-the-fact logs, Illumio is purpose-built for breach containment across dynamic hybrid environments. It watches how workloads and applications actually communicate, providing live visibility into east-west traffic across your clouds, data centers, endpoints, and containers.

Illumio Insights

Illumio Insights brings a new level of visibility to ransomware defense.  

Instead of scanning for known threats, it models how ransomware could move — from one workload to the next, between cloud and on-premises environments, and toward your most critical systems.

Its AI-driven analysis leveraging an AI security graph uncovers high-risk pathways that attackers could exploit. Then, it automatically recommends segmentation policies to close those gaps which can be enforced instantly through Illumio Segmentation.

The Insights Agent capability also delivers role-specific dashboards tailored to security operations center (SOC) analysts, CISOs, infrastructure engineers, and application owners. This means each team sees the most relevant risks and knows exactly how to respond.

Illumioセグメンテーション

Illumio Segmentation turns those insights into action.  

With just a few clicks, you can isolate compromised workloads, enforce least-privilege access, and prevent ransomware from jumping to other systems without re-architecting your network or writing complex firewall rules.

Because it operates at the workload level, Segmentation works seamlessly across public clouds, private data centers, hybrid infrastructure, and containers.  

It doesn’t rely on virtual local area networks (VLANs) or rigid zoning. It adapts in real time as your environment changes, giving you scalable ransomware segmentation solutions that match the pace of your business.

4 ways Illumio prevents ransomware lateral movement

Illumio defends against ransomware spread in hybrid IT by delivering end-to-end visibility and control:

1. Visualize before it happens

Most tools tell you what ransomware did. Illumio shows you what it could do before it ever moves.

Illumio Insights maps your environment’s real-time traffic patterns and relationships, revealing the potential blast radius of a breach. This lets security teams proactively identify exposed paths and toxic combinations, so they can segment them before attackers exploit them.

2. Detect lateral movement as it happens

Ransomware spreads fast. Illumio detects it faster.

Insights continuously monitors behavioral changes across workloads, flagging suspicious pivots and east-west traffic anomalies — even if the threat hasn’t yet triggered a known signature.  

It’s the visibility you need to catch ransomware in motion, not just after the damage is done.

3. Isolate infected workloads instantly

When a threat is detected, Illumio Segmentation empowers you to respond immediately.

Instead of taking down entire environments or relying on slow manual interventions, you can surgically isolate infected systems with one-click policy enforcement. This limits the blast radius and preserves uptime for unaffected services.

4. Build a resilient segmentation strategy

Illumio helps teams evolve their Zero Trust architecture over time by continuously analyzing traffic and recommending new policies that reduce exposure.

This ensures your ransomware containment strategy stays current, adaptive, and enforceable across your entire hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure.

Why Illumio beats traditional ransomware protection tools

Many legacy security solutions, such as firewalls, endpoint detection, or traditional network segmentation, still operate on old assumptions. They assume that you can keep attackers out, that environments don’t change, and that alerts will save you.

The reality is that ransomware slips in quietly and spreads laterally, often long before anyone notices.

Firewall-based tools are still focused on north-south traffic which is the traffic coming in and out of the network.  

They struggle to track or block east-west movement inside your hybrid infrastructure. Most require intensive manual configuration, static scope definitions, and predefined zones — none of which keep pace with dynamic cloud workloads.

And when it’s time to respond? You're left writing custom rules or waiting on changes that might take hours long after ransomware has spread.

In contrast, Illumio sees what traditional tools miss.  

It gives you instant visibility into real-time communication between workloads. It flags the paths ransomware is most likely to take. And it gives you the ability to block those paths in minutes before lateral movement begins.

Don’t wait for attacks to spread before taking action

Ransomware doesn’t need weeks to cause damage. It needs minutes.

By the time your antivirus lights up or your logs trigger a flag, the attacker may already have moved laterally, accessed sensitive systems, and encrypted key workloads.

Illumio puts you ahead of that curve.

It helps you prevent ransomware spread, contain breaches fast, and protect your hybrid environment from within.

If your current tools can’t stop ransomware from moving laterally, it’s time to rethink your approach.

Illumio Insightsを無料でお試しください to see how you can go from detection to containment in minutes.