Zero Trust
What is Zero Trust?
“Zero Trust” is all in the name. Zero Trust eliminates automatic access for any source – internal or external – and assumes that internal network traffic cannot be trusted without prior authorization. As operating models evolve with more employees working remotely, the need for a holistic Zero Trust approach is even more urgent.
“Forrester recently concluded that Zero Trust can reduce an organization’s risk exposure by 37% or more. But it also found that organizations deploying Zero Trust can reduce security costs by 31% and realize millions of dollars in savings in their overall IT security budgets.”
Your Zero Trust strategy and micro-segmentation
Focusing primarily on perimeter security and firewalls is no longer enough. Many organizations are now adopting the Zero Trust security mindset of “never trust, always verify” to segment internal networks and prevent the spread of breaches. As users move steadily off the campus network to a distributed work-from-home model, this principle must be extended to endpoints to reduce the attack surface.
Trust nothing inside
or outside your
perimeter, on or off
your network.
Verify everything – every user and every device – that tries to connect to your systems and applications.
Anticipate breach and focus on preventing ransomware and bad actors from moving laterally inside environments.
This approach shifts the conversation to preventive containment, with a focus on preventing lateral movement between endpoints, between users and data center applications, and inside your data center and cloud environments.
As a result, micro-segmentation – a security control to stop lateral movement – has become a foundational component for Zero Trust.
Illumio delivers end-to-end Zero Trust micro-segmentation from the data center and cloud to endpoints to stop the spread of ransomware and bad actors. Illumio protects against lateral movement across users, end-user devices, applications and workloads, network devices, servers, and other infrastructure.
While endpoint-focused security solutions have evolved, ransomware continues to impact enterprises ... Worms such as WannaCry and NotPetya rely on lateral movement to escalate a containable nuisance to a cataclysmic attack. Microsegmentation and focused granular internal controls mitigate this problem and must be deployed as part of a Zero Trust strategy.
Forrester Research
Conversations on
Mobilizing Zero Trust
Dr. Chase Cunningham, VP of Research and Principal Analyst at Forrester, joins Illumio CTO PJ Kirner to discuss strategies for getting started with Zero Trust.
Achieving Effective Zero Trust for the New World
PJ and Chase return to discuss how Zero Trust priorities have evolved to address remote work environments
and ransomware.
How Illumio aligns with the ZTX framework
Data
Network
Workloads
People
Devices
Visibility & Analytics
Automation & Orchestration
Manageability & Usability
APIs
Future State of Infrastructure
Data
Network
Workloads
People
Devices
Visibility & Analytics
Automation & Orchestration
Manageability & Usability
APIs
Future State of Infrastructure
5 practical steps to enable Zero Trust security
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Use a real-time map to identify your high-value systems, connections, and dependencies
Gaining deep visibility into users, devices, applications, and more is a critical first step of Zero Trust. Illumio ASP enables you to identify and visualize high-value systems and critical applications with an interactive, real-time map.
- Map the connections and flows of sensitive data across networks, workloads, and applications.
- Use the insights you gain from application dependency mapping to break down organizational silos and engage business and IT stakeholders and application owners in designing Zero Trust microperimeters.
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Architect and test your Zero Trust security policies
Zero Trust requires coordinating policies governing all of your internal defenses. Illumio ASP allows you to model and test those policies to ensure security and business continuity once it’s enforcement time.
- Architect the optimal micro-segmentation strategy for Zero Trust security.
- Visualize and test policies before enforcement without breaking applications.
- Select and apply the right level of segmentation across heterogeneous compute environments.
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Enforce Zero Trust with segmentation that's decoupled from your network
Effective segmentation is a core capability of Zero Trust. The key to segmenting down to a microperimeter level and maintaining policy consistently across your heterogenous environments? Illumio decouples segmentation from your network and underlying infrastructure – for a fast, safe, and effective approach to Zero Trust segmentation.
- Use a whitelisting model to define the authorized connections between workloads and ensure policy
implementation is always default-deny. - Ensure security policies always follow the workloads and adapt as the workload environment changes.
- Secure data in transit without requiring any changes or upgrade to the existing network infrastructure.
- Use a whitelisting model to define the authorized connections between workloads and ensure policy
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Use vulnerability mapping for a risk-based approach to patching
Zero Trust is aimed at reducing your organization’s risk exposure. Illumio can help security teams prioritize patching strategies with a vulnerability map that enables you to measure – and mitigate – the risk and exposure of unpatched vulnerabilities.
- Overlay third-party vulnerability scan data with the application dependency map to visualize and identify an attacker’s potential pathways.
- Identify highest-risk workloads and applications based on vulnerability and East-West exposure and prioritize patching accordingly.
- Use micro-segmentation as a compensating control for open vulnerabilities when patching is not possible.
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Orchestrate IT operations and security processes to accelerate remediation and recovery
Automation and orchestration are key components of Zero Trust. Illumio publishes and maintains a rich set of REST APIs so you can interface with Illumio ASP and orchestrate IT operations, security incident responses, and security operations workflows.
- Integration with orchestration tools bakes in security in the provisioning and remediation process.
- Quickly identify orphaned and mislabeled workloads to clean up configuration management databases (CMDBs).
- Integration with security information and event management (SIEM) tools to orchestrate a security incident response.
October 16, 2019
“We did a security audit due to HIPAA. When we saw how much was involved in setting up traditional firewalls between our applications /servers...we discovered micro-segmentation. Illumio was by far the best choice."
- Sr. Network Administrator