Akamai Technologies announced that it is extending its industry-leading segmentation solution, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, to hybrid cloud environments. Extending Akamai Guardicore Segmentation to the cloud helps reduce attack surfaces and helps contain attacks targeting cloud-native workloads. Network security professionals can seamlessly manage segmentation across their public cloud environments with the benefits of faster time to policy deployment, single network governance across data centres, and reduced management complexity — all through a single interface. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation will be initially available for Microsoft Azure deployments via Azure Marketplace, followed by Akamai Connected Cloud beginning later this year.
Thirty-three percent of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) intended to increase their use of distributed cloud services to improve security and reliability, according to a recent survey commissioned by Akamai and conducted by ClearPath Strategies. However, nearly half (48%) of ITDMs claimed that security tools were missing or underdeveloped for a distributed cloud world, underscoring the need for better security tools to protect workloads in the cloud.
While organisations of all sizes are implementing public cloud strategies to innovate and realise new efficiencies, challenges remain. Leveraging Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in the cloud helps organisations address a lack of visibility into application behaviour, the need for multiple policies across cloud providers, and governance issues between DevOps and SecOps teams.
“Public and multi-cloud environments are crucial to most organisations’ business operations, but they lack the native visibility and security controls required to effectively lock down a cloud. For clouds to be secure, security practitioners must be able to see which applications, workloads, and traffic flows are moving within the environment,” said Pavel Gurvich, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Enterprise Security at Akamai. “Applying a microsegmentation policy in the cloud can give security practitioners comprehensive visibility and control across all cloud environments, from a single interface with one set of controls, without the need for agents. We can protect business-critical applications — whether they are on-premises, in the cloud, or on legacy servers — while reducing the number of security solutions that need to be managed.”
Benefits of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in the cloud include:
• Comprehensive agentless cloud-native visibility and enforcement enables administrators to visualise cloud workloads using a near-real-time interactive map of true network flows, understanding the application dependencies and bringing together DevOps and SecOps teams in cloud network security governance.
• Hybrid enforcement engine leveraging multiple enforcement points allows an organisation to simply define the intent of network policy and have the Akamai
• Guardicore Segmentation policy engine take care of the rest, dynamically deciding which agent-based and agentless enforcement points are used across the data centre.
• Integrated reputation analysis and threat intelligence firewall capabilities are designed to reduce time to detection and incident response time in the event of a breach.
• Scalable and secure solution ensures data does not leave your cloud environment and solution architecture scales automatically within it.