Once I have a look at the evolution of community safety and the way IT and safety practitioners have protected the community for the final 30 years, I can’t assist however discover how conventional community safety enforcement factors (insert your favourite firewall right here) are nonetheless used to safe networks and workloads. They’ve advanced to supply a various set of options (i.e., IPS, decryption, software detection) to deeply analyze site visitors coming out and in of the community to guard workloads. Nevertheless, whereas firewalls are very succesful home equipment, it has been confirmed that they aren’t sufficient to maintain malicious actors at bay, particularly if these actors handle to breach the firewall defenses and transfer laterally within the community. However why is that this?
We’re within the digital period, the place the idea of the perimeter is not contained to a location or a community phase. To offset this new actuality and supply a extra tailored-based coverage management for shielding workloads, distributors have moved safety nearer to the workload.
There are two approaches to do that -, utilizing agent or agentless strategies to construct a micro-perimeter across the workloads.
Which method is the proper one to take? Nicely, this relies on a number of components, together with organizations, sort of software, or staff construction. So, let’s begin untangling this.
The problem(s)
Essentially the most direct method to guard functions is to put in software program brokers on each workload and name it a day. Why? As a result of then each workload has its personal micro-perimeter, permitting entry to solely what is important.
Nevertheless, it isn’t at all times doable to put in a software program agent. Maybe it’s a mainframe software or a legacy working system that requires fine-grained insurance policies attributable to a compliance mandate. Or software workloads which can be within the cloud and the agent set up is solely not doable attributable to organizational constraints.
And this isn’t the one problem or consideration for selecting your method. The groups or teams that comprise any firm usually have completely different safety necessities from one another, resulting in the triad problem: folks, processes, and expertise.
Let’s begin with folks (coverage proprietor) and course of (coverage execution). Normally, every group has its personal set of distinctive necessities to guard its software workloads, and an outlined course of to implement these necessities within the coverage. To assist this, a instrument (expertise) is required, which should adapt to every group’s wants and needs to be able to defining a standard coverage throughout agent and agentless workloads.
To begin unwrapping this, it’s good to ask your self:
- What are we defending?
- Who’s the proprietor of the insurance policies?
- How is coverage execution achieved?
For instance:
Say you need to defend a finance software (what) utilizing an agent-based method (how), and the proprietor of the insurance policies is the App Group/Workload Group (who). On this state of affairs, so long as the applying doesn’t break and the staff can proceed to concentrate on coding, that is usually a suitable method. Nevertheless, when implementing the frequent coverage, the interpretation from human language to machine language tends to generate additional guidelines that aren’t essentially required. It is a frequent byproduct of the interpretation course of.
Now, let’s assume that in your group the safety of a legacy software (what) is tasked to the Community/NetSec staff (who) utilizing an agentless enforcement method with community firewalls (how) as a result of on this case, it isn’t doable to put in software program brokers as a result of unsupported legacy working system. As within the first instance, additional guidelines are generated. Nevertheless, on this case, these pointless additional guidelines create damaging penalties due to firewall guidelines auditing necessities for compliance mandates, although they’re a part of the frequent coverage.
Topology because the supply of reality – pushing solely what’s required
Cisco Safe Workload has been addressing the folks, course of, and expertise challenges since its inception. The answer embraces each approaches – putting in software program brokers on workloads no matter kind issue (bare-metal, VM, or container) or through the use of agentless enforcement factors resembling firewalls. Safe Workload adapts to every group’s wants by defining the coverage, such a zero belief microsegmentation coverage, to successfully apply micro-perimeters to software workloads in assist of the zero belief method. All inside a single pane of glass.
Nevertheless, as defined within the instance above, we nonetheless wanted to align our coverage to the compliance wants of the Community/NetSec staff, solely utilizing the coverage guidelines which can be required.
To sort out the extra guidelines problem, we requested ourselves, “What’s the best option to push insurance policies right into a community firewall utilizing Safe Workload?”
The reply boiled all the way down to a standard idea for Community/NetSec groups – the community topology.
So how does it work?
With Safe Workload, the time period topology is intrinsic to the answer. It leverages the topology idea utilizing a assemble named “Scopes”, that are completely infrastructure agnostic, as proven in Determine 1.
It means that you can create a topology tree in Safe Workload primarily based on context, the place you’ll be able to group your functions and outline your coverage through the use of human intent. For instance, “Manufacturing can’t speak to Non-Manufacturing” and apply the coverage following the topology hierarchy.
The Scope Tree is the topology of your software workloads throughout the group, however the secret is that it may be formed for various departments or organizational wants and tailored to every staff’s safety necessities.
The idea of mapping a workload Scope to a community firewall is known as “Topology Consciousness.”
Topology Consciousness allows the Community/NetSec groups to map a specific Scope to a particular firewall within the community topology, so solely the related set of insurance policies for a given software is pushed to the firewall.
So, what does this execution appear to be? With the Scope mapping achieved, Safe Workload pushes the related coverage to the Cisco Safe Firewall by means of its administration platform, Safe Firewall Administration Middle (FMC). To keep up compliance, solely the required coverage guidelines are despatched to FMC, avoiding the additional pointless guidelines due to Topology Consciousness. An instance of that is proven in Determine 2:
Key takeaways
Operationalizing a zero belief microsegmentation technique just isn’t trivial, however Safe Workload has a confirmed observe document of creating this a sensible actuality by adapting to the wants of every persona resembling Community/NetSec admins, Workload/Apps homeowners, Cloud Architects, and Cloud-Native engineers – all from one answer.
With topology consciousness, you’ll be able to:
- Meet compliance and audit necessities for firewall guidelines
- Shield and leverage your present funding in community firewalls
- Operationalize your zero belief microsegmentation technique utilizing each agent and agentless approaches
For extra data on agentless enforcement please learn: Safe Workload and Safe Firewall Unified Segmentation Weblog
Wish to study extra? Discover out extra at by testing our Safe Workload assets.
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