Akamai Guardicore Platform for Zero Trust

The Akamai Guardicore Platform is a combination of our microsegmentation, Zero Trust Network Access, DNS firewall, and managed threat hunting capabilities. Together, these components provide organizations with a single solution to adhere to the core principles of Zero Trust — including treating all entities as untrusted by default, enforcing least-privilege access, and maintaining comprehensive security monitoring.

Other security solutions that claim to enable Zero Trust security rely on partnerships or integrations to offer both ZTNA and microsegmentation capabilities together. The Akamai Guardicore Platform provides industry-leading east-west and north-south traffic visibility and control through a single unified console, all delivered by a single trusted vendor: Akamai.

ZTNA and microsegmentation enforce the basic principles of Zero Trust — all entities are untrusted, least-privilege access is enforced, and security is continuously monitored. Currently, enterprises deploy and manage these disparate point solutions. This creates complexity and operational overhead that can delay an enterprise’s transition to Zero Trust.

Akamai Guardicore Access combines microsegmentation and ZTNA into a unified solution that provides a single policy plan for application access and segmentation. It provides comprehensive end-to-end visibility from user to workload level, identity-based application access control for users irrespective of where they are located, and application access with true endpoint segmentation.

Akamai has extensive visibility into DNS traffic thanks to Akamai Connected Cloud, which resolves over 14 trillion DNS queries every day. By including our DNS firewall in the platform, we’re providing a true multilayered approach to achieving Zero Trust by further securing north-south traffic, while preventing those costly breaches. DNS is a prominent threat vector, and our DNS firewall blocks malicious DNS requests and stops many threats before they can land on your machine and spread to other assets. Meanwhile, microsegmentation is simultaneously isolating your machines and workloads, containing any potential breaches by preventing them from moving laterally.

Akamai is committed to using AI responsibly in our offerings, and we’ve found that generative AI can help make certain tasks and operations easier and more intuitive. Here are some examples:

Communicating with the network: The Akamai Guardicore Platform allows its users to communicate with their network logs using natural language. This can help expedite compliance efforts and time-sensitive incident response activity.

Accelerating labeling: Labels are the backbone of software-based segmentation, but not every organization has an accurate inventory of each asset they’re responsible for protecting. The Akamai Guardicore Platform can use AI to analyze the way in which these assets are behaving and suggest relevant application labels. These suggestions come with a confidence score, as well as an explanation with supporting evidence as to why the label was chosen.

Generating SQL queries: The powerful osquery is offered as an option with the Akamai Guardicore Platform, and it allows you to query specific information about the machines running in your environment. But you need to know how to create the relevant query using a SQL-like syntax. Most users know what they need to ask, but don’t know the syntax required. The Akamai Guardicore Platform can leverage AI to translate natural language into those queries, so even a not-so-technical professional can get their answers quickly. This is especially useful in vulnerability assessments, like for determining if and how you might be vulnerable to an exploit like Log4j.