What Are Network Segmentation Tools?

Many organizations today are turning to software-based network segmentation tools to protect their IT environments from increasingly sophisticated threats. Traditional on-premises hardware like firewalls are no longer enough to stop advanced malware, botnet attacks, phishing schemes, social engineering methods, and data extortion. Though firewalls continue to serve an important function at the perimeter — controlling “north-south” traffic entering the network from external sources — they do nothing to stop the spread of attacks that are already inside the network and spreading quickly from server to server via lateral movement.

In contrast, software-based network segmentation tools enable security teams to place microperimeters of control around critical IT assets housing sensitive data. Access to these assets is controlled through security policies that ensure only requests with a predefined business purpose are authorized. As a result, this type of network segmentation security can effectively identify attacks in progress and stop them from spreading within an environment.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides software-defined network segmentation tools that offer the fastest way to visualize and segment assets in the data center, cloud, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. With Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, you can isolate critical applications faster, reduce security incident resolution time, and achieve an average of 85% cost savings over security based on traditional firewalls.

Legacy firewall hardware lacks the flexibility, cross-platform protection, and scalability that modern organizations need to secure their complex IT environments. 

Visibility problems. Because legacy firewalls can’t provide visibility into the flow of data, security teams have a harder time implementing and maintaining security policies. As a result, firewalls often have extremely long rulesets, including lots of rules that are too permissive or unnecessary. Additionally, legacy firewalls can’t visualize communication paths between two applications, making it harder to understand what’s really happening.

Maintenance difficulties. Managing firewalls tends to be an iterative troubleshooting process as application owners and firewall administrators rarely know the appropriate IP ports and protocols that need to communicate.

Lack of agility. Changes to a firewall usually require scheduled downtime. That means application owners may need to wait a week or longer for the revision to be reviewed and then implemented during a maintenance window. Additionally, there is no way to validate policies or see if changes will create new risks because of unseen dependencies.

Network segmentation tools like Akamai Guardicore Segmentation are designed to overcome the operational and security challenges of legacy firewall technology. Akamai’s software-based approach is decoupled from the physical network, providing a faster and more cost-effective alternative to firewalls. And unlike other segmentation solutions, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation integrates deep visibility of the entire IT environment into its policy engine.

This level of visibility is critical to implementing microsegmentation, the most effective way to control east-west traffic and protect against lateral movement. Akamai’s network segmentation tools deliver all the capabilities you need to achieve a higher level of security quickly and easily — with no downtime.

Get complete visibility. Automatically visualize your entire data center environment. Map application dependencies and communication flows with a network segmentation diagram to identify security gaps. From a single pane of glass, you can visualize and understand the varying relationships between assets in legacy, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments.

Architect microsegmentation policies. Create granular security policies with accuracy and certainty. Leverage AI to quickly create policies based on asset classification. Easily manage policies across all environments. Secure your critical IT assets and reduce your attack surface.

Detect breaches. Quickly identify malicious behavior happening within your environment. Block malicious traffic to and from attackers with a threat intelligence firewall bolstered by Akamai threat intelligence. Identify and analyze malicious lateral movement with dynamic deception. Detect malicious processes and traffic with signature-based reputation analysis.

Implement faster. Starting with complete visibility and a clear understanding of what’s happening inside your IT environment, you can use Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s AI-powered templates and more to accelerate network segmentation design and implementation.

Avoid downtime. Because Akamai’s software-based network segmentation tools are decoupled from physical infrastructure, you don’t need to make any changes to the underlying infrastructure to implement segmentation, avoiding costly downtime.

Anticipate effects of changes. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation makes it possible to see the effects of segmentation policies before they are enforced, reducing the potential for error and helping your teams plan accordingly.

Eliminate latency. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation eliminates network bottlenecks by using distributed, software-based segmentation policies, rather than forcing traffic through specific firewall chokepoints, which significantly reduces latency. Also, because policies can be set with greater precision and awareness of existing dependencies, you can reduce the risk of inadvertently creating user-access issues.

Be infrastructure agnostic. Because segmentation policies are enforced without relying on the underlying infrastructure, the same policies will apply regardless of where the asset or workload resides — in the data center, the cloud, or any part of your hybrid environment.

• Simpler segmentation. Isolate critical applications faster than when using legacy firewalls.
• Faster incident resolution. Reduce security incident resolution time.
• Consistent policy enforcement. Enforce granular, process-level rules across different operating environments.
• Broad coverage. Protect critical assets no matter where they are deployed.
• Easier management. Visualize environments, segment assets, and detect breaches from a single pane of glass.
• Extensive integration. Rely on integration with 50+ security and infrastructure management tools.
• Improved compliance. Simplify compliance with automatic validation of network-related compliance policies. Reduce compliance costs and scope with network segmentation for regulations like PCI DSS and more.