I had the opportunity to talk with PJ Kirner, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, and Chris Westphal, Product Marketing at Illumio.

The company is moving forward in the microsegmentation space making its Adaptive Security Platform the new foundation for data center and cloud security with capabilities and support for ACLs on Cisco and Dynamic Filters on Arista data center network switches, as well as AWS Security Groups and Azure Network Security Groups. These new capabilities will be delivered to market during 2017 and the switch integrations will be demonstrated on the floor of the RSA conference in February.

“As segmentation becomes the core strategy for data center and cloud security, organizations are now looking at how other elements of their compute environment can be used to enforce these policies,” said PJ Kirner. “Our customers have asked us to efficiently coordinate policy across their data center and cloud environments, simplifying management of the security control plane. This expansion of our platform builds on our previously demonstrated capability of programming the F5 LTM and AFM and represents our next step towards Illumio’s vision for adaptive segmentation.”

Today organizations are looking at segmentation to move beyond reactive breach detection solutions to a proactive protection model that stops the lateral movement of bad actors. However, that shift often comes with additional operational overhead and inconsistent policies that don’t scale across their environments.

“Despite the rapid increase in cybersecurity spending focused on implementing stronger security controls to limit access to sensitive data and applications -- organizations of all sizes don’t always end up with more secure environments,” said Jon Oltsik, ESG’s senior principal analyst and founder of the firm’s cybersercurity service. “The ability to drive segmentation-in-depth throughout the data center and cloud can be a critical next step in securing data center and cloud environments”

By extending Illumio ASP’s enforcement point ecosystem from the workload (bare metal servers, virtual machines, containerized hosts) to the additional security controls in the network and cloud, Illumio is delivering on the promise of segmentation and is ending the need to manage multiple, disconnected policy models.

This provides three core benefits:

1. Eliminates the security gaps generated by the disparate, uncoordinated security policies enforced separately at the workload, in the network and in cloud environments

2. Reduces the operational overhead of manual segmentation provisioning by taking advantage of software-driven automation of security policies

3. Stops the addition of unnecessary firewall chokepoints or SDN deployments to achieve robust segmentation-based security

“One of the biggest challenges in security is battling complexity and that’s amplified by increasing heterogeneity that we see in customer data centers and cloud environments. Legacy infrastructure combined with virtualization and cloud means there is opportunity for coordinated points of policy enforcement,” said Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst at 451 Research. “We see segmentation in depth addressing a real requirement for customers who are looking to both strengthen security and simplify operations by centralizing and harmonizing policy and enforcement across different environments.”

Given the sprawl of intrastructures Illumio is providing harmonization with multi-cloud and hybrid solutions providing protection at the network, cloud, and application layer. This is a tremendous benefit, and provides vision and peace of mind, to the CISO who owns the network and the infrastructure.