Illumio + Netskope: Build a Complete Zero Trust Security Architecture

With the average cost of a breach ballooning to $4.88 million per incident — a 10% increase over last year — organizations are facing enormous pressure to shield their networks from attacks. Data breaches and ransomware attacks are no longer hypothetical. They’re realities knocking at your door.  

Enter Zero Trust, a security strategy designed to confront these challenges head-on by assuming that no entity, internal or external, should be trusted by default.  

Cybersecurity experts John Kindervag, chief evangelist at Illumio, and Steve Riley, field CTO at Netskope, sat down to discuss the essentials of Zero Trust, how Illumio ZTS and Netskope ZTNA complement each other, and how the integration works.

Watch the full webinar, Securing Your Network in Every Direction with Zero Trust:

Why Zero Trust is a non-negotiable

We’ve seen it time and again: Companies invest heavily in security, only to find themselves at the mercy of cybercriminals who slip through the cracks of traditional perimeter-based defenses.  

Why? Because the threat landscape has evolved. Remote workforces, cloud-based applications, and multi-cloud environments mean that your network now extends far beyond the company’s four walls. This shift has led many IT leaders to adopt a zero-trust strategy.  

At its core, Zero Trust says, “Don’t trust anyone or anything—whether they’re inside or outside the network—until they’ve been verified.”  

As John Kindervag, chief evangelist at Illumio and the creator of Zero Trust, pointed out during the webinar: “Zero Trust isn’t a product or something you buy off the shelf. It’s a strategy — a way of thinking.”

End-to-end Zero Trust with Illumio ZTS + Netskope ZTNA

There are two critical components to a successful zero-trust strategy: Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).  

Kindervag and Steve Riley, field CTO at Netskope, broke it down in the webinar:

Illumio ZTS

Imagine your data center as a busy airport. Planes are constantly taking off and landing (this is your traffic, moving east-west within the data center). If a breach occurs, it’s like a fire breaking out in one part of the airport.

Without microsegmentation, that fire could spread uncontrollably. Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation isolates the fire by containing breaches at their source, preventing them from moving through your network and wreaking havoc. Microsegmentation gives you full visibility and granular segmentation of the workloads and data moving across your network.

Illumio is the Leader in microsegmentation in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2024.

Netskope ZTNA

While Illumio secures internal traffic, Netskope focuses on managing what gets in and out of your network perimeter.

Think of it as airport security, scanning each passenger and determining which flights they can access. Netskope is a leader in securing north-south traffic, especially for users accessing cloud applications and data. Netskope ZTNA ensures that only the right people, on the right devices, under the right conditions, can access sensitive company resources.

Together, these platforms create a “better together” scenario for zero-trust security. Combining Illumio’s microsegmentation with Netskope’s access controls, you get a full-circle defense strategy, whether the traffic is moving within your network or coming in from the outside.

How Illumio + Netskope’s integration works

The Illumio and Netskope integration makes it easier to build a complete zero-trust architecture.  

Illumio’s platform labels every workload. These labels are passed on to Netskope. In turn, Netskope uses these labels to enforce dynamic, policy-based access control decisions.  

This integration ensures that even as your environment evolves with new users, devices, and applications constantly coming online, your zero-trust policies stay up to date automatically.  

Steve Riley summed it up well during the webinar: “What’s cool about our partnership is that it’s dynamic and automated. There’s no need to manually type in IP addresses or define new policies every time a new workload spins up. The systems just talk to each other.”  

This reduces management overhead and speeds up the process of building a complete zero-trust strategy.

Learn more about the Illumio + Netskope integration.

Illumio + Netskope use case: Contain a ransomware attack

One of the most compelling use cases for the Illumio + Netskope integration is ransomware containment.  

Imagine a scenario where a workload in your data center becomes infected with ransomware. Using Illumio ZTS, you can put a “quarantined” label on that compromised workload. This will isolate it from the rest of your network. Illumio’s platform will ensure that the malware doesn’t spread to other workloads, preventing a full-blown disaster.  

But what about controlling access to that infected workload? Here’s where Netskope steps in.

Once the workload is quarantined, Netskope dynamically updates its policies to block all users from accessing the compromised server except for designated system administrators who need access to investigate and resolve the issue. This dual-layer defense — Illumio containing the threat and Netskope managing who can access it — makes a ransomware attack much easier to contain and resolve.

This level of flexibility is vital. Instead of shutting down entire systems or networks, you can:

• Surgically isolate infected areas

• Keep the rest of your infrastructure running

• Allow trusted team members to quickly start the recovery process

The road ahead: The growing importance of Zero Trust

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 65% of organizations will have implemented some form of microsegmentation as part of their zero-trust strategy, up from just 6% today.  

The reason for this surge is simple. Traditional security approaches can no longer keep up with the evolving threat landscape. Zero Trust is the best defense we have against modern attacks.

What’s more, federal mandates and government contracts are increasingly requiring zero-trust architectures. This means that for many organizations, building Zero Trust isn’t just a security best practice, it’s a compliance requirement.

And while Zero Trust may sound like a complex undertaking, the integration between Illumio and Netskope shows that it doesn’t have to be. By automating key parts of the process, like microsegmentation, labeling, and access control, these two platforms make it easier than ever to build a complete zero-trust strategy, even in fast-paced, hybrid environments.

Ready to build a complete zero-trust architecture with ZTNA and ZTS? Learn more about the Illumio + Netskope integration and contact us today.