Illumio CloudSecure: Contain Cloud Attacks With Proactive Segmentation Policy Controls

In just the last year, 47 percent of all cyberattacks originated in the cloud, according to research by Vanson Bourne. If your organization is in the cloud, protecting the applications, systems, and critical assets is critical. But using a traditional perimeter-based security model is no longer sufficient to protect against today’s sophisticated cyber threats.

Breaches are inevitable — and organizations must take action now by adopting a breach containment approach to cybersecurity in the cloud. Foundational to this is Zero Trust Segmentation which enables security teams to implement proactive security controls that contain breaches at their source.  

Keep reading to learn how Zero Trust Segmentation with Illumio can help you proactively set policies that stop and contain attacks in the cloud.  

What is Zero Trust Segmentation in the cloud?

With the cloud accounting for nearly half of all breaches, building cyber resilience in the cloud should be a top priority for organizations across every industry, geography, and size. The best way to build cyber resilience is through Zero Trust, a globally validated strategy based on a mantra of “never trust, always verify.”  

Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS), also called microsegmentation, is a key pillar of Zero Trust. You cannot achieve Zero Trust without it. ZTS enables a consistent approach to microsegmention across the hybrid attack surface, enabling organizations to see and reduce risk across the cloud, endpoints, and data centers. Compared to segmentation with static, legacy firewalls, ZTS makes segmentation simple and easy — and helps you extend a Zero Trust architecture to your cloud environments.  

Zero Trust Segmentation is essential in the cloud

The proactive approach of ZTS is particularly essential in cloud environments where dynamic workloads and a diverse range of applications create a complex and ever-changing attack surface. Without effective segmentation, malicious actors can exploit vulnerabilities, move laterally within the network, and potentially compromise sensitive data and resources.  

The result is that security teams must constantly play catch up, with over 95 percent of cybersecurity business leaders highlighting the need for better reaction times to cloud breaches. In fact, only 24 percent of those surveyed felt highly confident that they can stop attackers when they inevitably breach the network. This is evidence that traditional prevention and detection tools aren’t enough to secure organizations against cloud attacks.

93 percent of security decision makers agreeing that ZTS is essential to cloud security. It’s time to update to a breach containment mindset that includes ZTS as a foundational technology.  

How to proactively secure your cloud environments

The cloud is subject to two main challenges that traditional security models struggle to manage:

• The dynamic nature of cloud environments, coupled with the continuous deployment and scaling of resources, makes it challenging to maintain a consistent security posture.  
• The shared responsibility model adopted by cloud service providers means that organizations must actively manage and secure their own data, applications, and workloads within the cloud infrastructure.

Learn how to solve the top cloud security problems in our guide.  

Organizations can address cloud security challenges by implementing proactive segmentation controls with Zero Trust Segmentation.

Granular segmentation controls offered by ZTS allow security teams to define and enforce policies based on specific criteria such as application type or whether an application is in-development or live. Unlike reactive approaches that respond to incidents after they occur, proactive controls can help ensure consistent cloud security that reduces the impact of cyberattacks, taking them from a catastrophic breach to a small security incident.

One of the primary issues these proactive controls solve is the lateral movement of threats within the network. By enforcing strict policies at the application and workload level to only allow trusted communications, security teams can restrict unauthorized access between different segments, limiting a breach’s ability to move and cause significant damage. This preventive measure is crucial in thwarting sophisticated attacks that aim to traverse through the network undetected.

Cloud environments change constantly, and proactive security controls address the challenges posed by the ever-changing cloud environment.

Illumio CloudSecure: Zero Trust Segmentation for the public cloud

Illumio CloudSecure helps security teams stay on top of cloud attacks by applying proactive segmentation controls.

Watch this demo to learn how Illumio CloudSecure works:

• Get granular visibility into how applications and workloads are communicating and interacting. This provides insights that can help create proactive and precise segmentation policies that align with business requirements without compromising security.
• Apply security controls based on contextual factors pulled in from cloud resource metadata and labels to help prepare for emerging threats and the ever-evolving nature of cloud attacks.
• Implement granular security policies that can be adjusted in real-time based on the changing nature of the environment. This ensures that security controls remain consistent even as applications and workloads scale or shift.
• Proactively contain attacks across a mix of on-premises and cloud-based resources to apply consistent security across public cloud and multi-cloud environments.
• Adopt a Zero Trust security model in the cloud, ensuring a robust defense against both internal and external threats.

With Illumio CloudSecure, security teams can achieve a more robust approach to cloud security. ZTS implemented with Illumio CloudSecure can fortify your organization’s security posture, minimize the risk of lateral movement, and confidently embrace the benefits of the cloud without compromising on data integrity and confidentiality.

Start your free trial of Illumio CloudSecure today. No software installation or credit card required.