While network segmentation places controls around sections of a network, microsegmentation places controls around individual applications, workloads, and other critical IT assets. Microsegmentation improves security by stopping attackers from moving laterally throughout an environment, effectively neutralizing cyberattacks or limiting the damage they can do.
Protecting your environment with network segmentation security
Legacy tools like VLANs and on-premises firewalls are no longer enough to protect today’s IT environments from advanced and quickly evolving threats.
As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated, it’s no longer a matter of “if” but “when” a breach occurs. And any attack that breaches perimeter defenses will attempt to quickly spread by moving laterally from machine to machine within an IT environment. Because they only control traffic at the perimeter, legacy firewalls offer little protection against attacks that have started or landed inside the network. And solutions like VLANs can be too costly to implement, too time-consuming to manage, and too impractical in hybrid IT environments.
Software-based network segmentation security solutions offer a highly effective alternative — especially when employing policies for microsegmentation. By placing microperimeters around critical IT assets, network segmentation security can apply workload and process-level security controls that limit access to important assets while detecting and blocking lateral movement attacks.
For enterprises seeking the fastest way to implement network segmentation security in data center, cloud, or hybrid cloud environments, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides a software-based approach that can streamline network security, data compliance, and cloud migration processes all within a single platform.
How does network segmentation security work?
Network segmentation, and microsegmentation in particular, offers a far more effective way to secure IT environments than traditional approaches that focus on defending the network perimeter. In the past, network security involved building stronger perimeter walls around a defined IT environment. These were designed to keep the bad guys out while letting legitimate traffic through. Anything that was already within the network was assumed to be safe.
But as cyberattacks have grown more sophisticated and breaches have become more common, traditional defenses offer little help in stopping an attack that has successfully landed or started inside a network. Security teams have used legacy network segmentation tools with some success, creating multiple subnetworks and limiting the traffic between them to stop the spread of these attacks. However, with the rise of more sophisticated threats like ransomware and advanced persistent threats, enterprises need a more effective way to neutralize breaches and protect critical IT assets.
Segmentation strategies in an organizational network
Microsegmentation is the answer. As a more granular form of network segmentation security, microsegmentation isolates workloads from one another and secures them individually. IT operators can set network segmentation policy rules for elements such as users, domain names, devices, processes, and containers. As a result, microsegmentation can control and block lateral movement within an environment, effectively neutralizing sophisticated threats.
To implement microsegmentation and network segmentation security, IT operators need deep visibility into all their IT assets and into the communication flows and dependencies between them. Once this visibility is achieved, security teams can create microperimeters around assets and set security policies that govern access to them.
The key to successful network segmentation security is finding a solution that can streamline tasks for administrators and ensure that policies don’t create bottlenecks. That’s where Akamai can help.
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation: software-defined network segmentation
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is designed to simplify network segmentation security in today’s dynamic and virtualized network environments, hybrid data centers, and clouds. As a software-only approach to segmentation, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is decoupled from the physical network to provide a faster and more cost-effective alternative to legacy network segmentation firewalls.
With Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, administrators can access all the tools they need to manage security segmentation effectively and efficiently.
Visibility across all IT environments
From data centers and endpoints to cloud and hybrid cloud environments, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides comprehensive visibility into all of the IT assets within an enterprise network. Visualization tools provide a network segmentation diagram that includes full context for networks, assets, processes, users, and traffic flows. With Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, you can automatically classify assets, visualize the application dependencies between them, identify security gaps, and set more accurate security policies.
Create effective policies
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides AI-powered templates and other features for swift and simple network segmentation that you can apply anywhere within your environment. Rapidly deploy segmentation policies across dynamic environments. Simplify management with network segmentation security tools that let you move to a Zero Trust posture more quickly.
Detect breaches faster
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation includes multiple breach detection capabilities, including dynamic deception, reputation analysis, and a threat intelligence firewall.
The benefits of network segmentation security with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers significant advantages over alternative solutions to network security.
- Rapid implementation. Isolate critical applications faster than when using legacy firewalls.
- Lower cost. Achieve 85% cost savings over using firewalls.
- Faster response. Reduce security incident resolution time by 96%.
- Reduced attack surface. Eliminate lateral movement to reduce your attack surface and lower risk by 99%.
- Centralized management. Visualize your IT environment and set network segmentation security policies from a single pane of glass.
- Easy integration. Integrate Akamai Guardicore Segmentation with 50+ security infrastructure management tools.
Why Akamai Guardicore Segmentation?
- Extensive coverage. Enjoy broad coverage from devices to cloud and everything in between.
- Consistent enforcement. Enforce granular, process-level rules across Windows, Linux, and other operating environments, including legacy systems like Windows 2003, CentOS 6, RHEL5, and more.
- Faster segmentation. Rely on templates and AI-powered segmentation to create and enforce effective policies in just a few clicks.
- No downtime. Get faster results with no changes to networks or applications and no downtime.
- Streamlined compliance. Reduce compliance costs and effort with automatic validation of network-related compliance policies. Reduce scope with network segmentation for PCI DSS and other critical regulations.
FAQs
Network segmentation is the task of dividing or partitioning a computer network into smaller parts. Segmentation controls the flow of traffic between different parts of the network. Segmentation policy determines what types of traffic, if any, can move between network segments.
Network segmentation can improve security by limiting how far an attack can spread once it has landed in an IT environment. Strong segmentation can prevent an attack in one area from affecting IT assets in another.
Why customers choose Akamai
Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence.