Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences — helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform, puts apps and experiences closer to users and keeps threats farther away.
Protecting IT environments
Application vulnerabilities are one of the major targets of cybercriminals seeking to access an organization’s IT network. As applications become more complex and are distributed across dynamic hybrid cloud environments, attackers have more opportunities to bypass antivirus controls and find misconfigurations in network defenses. For cybersecurity teams, this evolution in application security has necessitated a shift away from traditional endpoint security or perimeter defenses to investments in detecting and preventing data breaches that use lateral movement to spread throughout endpoints, on-premises, and cloud infrastructure.
Application control through segmentation is a highly effective way of minimizing security risks by stopping lateral movement. By enforcing clear separation between the tiers of an individual application and isolating complete applications from unrelated resources, security teams can effectively block lateral movement, improving network and data security while maintaining business agility and development momentum.
As a software-based solution for segmentation, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides all the tools security teams need to isolate critical applications, prevent unsanctioned activity, and defend high-value assets from security threats.
Application control through microsegmentation
Approaches to application control typically focus on access control for specific files or programs, so that unauthorized applications cannot run. Traditional segmentation relies primarily on implementing Layer 4 controls. Microsegmentation, however, offers a more effective approach to isolating applications with super-granular segmentation policies for maximum risk reduction without impacting productivity.
Traditional segmentation relies on enforcing network traffic policy through firewalls and other legacy hardware that are time-consuming to manage and susceptible to configuration errors. They also do not provide clear visibility into the impact of controls on communication between specific applications.
Layer 4 controls are also very coarse. Sophisticated attackers who are skilled at spoofing IP addresses and piggybacking on allowed ports can easily circumvent Layer 4 application controls.
Microsegmentation improves on traditional application control techniques in two ways. First, it provides a detailed visual representation of the environment, the assets in it, the communication flows between them, and the policies protecting them.
Microsegmentation security also provides greater application awareness, displaying and controlling activity at Layer 7 in addition to Layer 4. This allows specific processes and associated data flows to serve as the basis for segmentation policies. Rather than relying only on IP addresses and ports, microsegmentation rules can be based on application inclusion listing that allows very specific processes and flows while blocking everything else by default.
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers the fastest way to visualize and segment assets in the data center, cloud, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Using a software-based approach to microsegmentation and network segmentation, Akamai helps security teams reduce the attack surface, prevent lateral movement, and secure critical assets quickly and easily.
Unlike traditional firewalls and VLANs, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers a policy engine that is deeply informed by visibility of the entire IT environment. Additionally, because this Akamai product is decoupled from the physical network, it enables security teams to segment assets more quickly than with firewalls and to enforce policy throughout a hybrid cloud environment from a single pane of glass.
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides all the capabilities security teams need to implement effective application control through microsegmentation.
Visualize applications and dependencies
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation presents detailed information about application functionality, communication flows, and dependencies in a visual, interactive map of an IT infrastructure. With this contextual view, administrators can easily understand how applications work and create powerful security policies that protect applications throughout an IT environment — from legacy bare-metal servers to hybrid cloud deployments.
AI-powered microsegmentation
Administrators can simply click on a communication flow in Akamai’s visual map to get automated rule suggestions based on historical observations. Akamai’s intuitive workflow and flexible policy engine include AI-powered tools and templates that help to automate processes and create granular policy in seconds.
Limit the scope of compliance environments
In regulatory frameworks like PCI DSS, applications can be considered out of scope if they’re unable to communicate with other components within the compliance environment. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s application control capabilities allow teams to create software-defined segmentation policies that enforce this level of isolation.
Innovate quickly and securely
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation enables technology and security teams to move in the same direction by making it easier to implement strong security control without slowing application development. Akamai reveals how applications work and interact in detail, allowing teams to create security policies that are independent of applications and their underlying infrastructure.
Benefits of this Akamai solution include:
Faster incident resolution. Reduce security incident resolution time by up to 96%.
Simpler segmentation. Isolate critical applications up to 20x faster than with firewalls.
Broad coverage. Protect critical assets no matter where they are deployed.
Consistent policy enforcement. Enforce granular, process-level rules across different operating environments.
Easier management. Visualize environments, segment assets, detect breaches, and manage application control policies 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.
Application control with ringfencing
Most organizations have a collection of applications that are mission-critical to the business. These may include customer-facing web applications, databases containing sensitive information, and productivity applications that are critical to day-to-day operations. When cyberattacks compromise these critical assets or take them offline, a company’s business and reputation can suffer dramatically.
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation enables security teams to “ringfence” high-value assets with precise segmentation policies that help proactively detect targeted attacks.
Visualize critical applications in detail
Akamai enables security teams to understand how critical applications work and communicate, so they can take steps to proactively protect them.
Create granular ringfencing policies
With Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, administrators can tightly control how applications function and isolate them to the greatest extent possible.
Detect and respond to attacks quickly
Akamai offers multiple complementary techniques to detect and mitigate attacks against critical assets.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Application control is a security practice that prevents applications from executing unauthorized actions that could jeopardize security. Application control practices require authentication and validity checks for applications and data before being allowed to transmit files or execute actions within an organization’s IT environment.
Application control can help prevent malware such as ransomware from executing within an IT environment and help to block malicious exploits. Superior application control also improves information security by enforcing Zero Trust networking principles.