You hear lots about zero belief microsegmentation as of late and rightly so. It has matured right into a confirmed safety best-practice to successfully stop unauthorized lateral motion throughout community assets. It entails dividing your community into remoted segments, or “microsegments,” the place every section has its personal set of safety insurance policies and controls. On this approach, even when a breach happens or a possible risk features entry to a useful resource, the blast radius is contained.
And like many safety practices, there are other ways to attain the target, and usually a lot of it will depend on the distinctive buyer surroundings. For microsegmentation, the hot button is to have a trusted associate that not solely supplies a strong safety resolution however provides you the pliability to adapt to your wants as an alternative of forcing a “one measurement suits all” strategy.
Now, there are broadly two completely different approaches you’ll be able to take to attain your microsegmentation targets:
- A bunch-based enforcement strategy the place the insurance policies are enforced on the workload itself. This may be performed by putting in an agent on the workload or by leveraging APIs in public cloud.
- A network-based enforcement strategy the place the insurance policies are enforced on a community gadget like an east-west community firewall or a change.
Whereas a host-based enforcement strategy is immensely highly effective as a result of it supplies entry to wealthy telemetry when it comes to processes, packages, and CVEs working on the workloads, it might not at all times be a realistic strategy for a myriad of causes. These causes can vary from utility group perceptions, community safety group preferences, or just the necessity for a special strategy to attain buy-in throughout the group.
Lengthy story brief, to make microsegmentation sensible and achievable, it’s clear {that a} dynamic duo of host and network-based safety is essential to a strong and resilient zero belief cybersecurity technique. Earlier this yr, Cisco accomplished the native integration between Cisco Safe Workload and Cisco Safe Firewall delivering on this precept and offering prospects with unmatched flexibility in addition to protection in depth. Let’s take a deeper take a look at what this integration allows our prospects to attain and a number of the use instances.
Use case #1: Community visibility by way of an east-west community firewall
The journey to microsegmentation begins with visibility. This can be a good alternative for me to insert the cliché right here – “What you’ll be able to’t see, you’ll be able to’t defend.” Within the context of microsegmentation, move visibility supplies the muse for constructing a blueprint of how purposes talk with one another, in addition to customers and gadgets – each inside and outdoors the datacenter.
The combination between Safe Workload and Safe Firewall allows the ingestion of NSEL move data to supply community move visibility, as proven in Determine 1. You may additional enrich this community move information by bringing in context within the type of labels and tags from exterior methods like CMDB, IPAM, identification sources, and many others. This contextually enriched information set means that you can shortly determine the communication patterns and any indicators of compromise throughout your utility panorama, enabling you to instantly enhance your safety posture.
Determine 1: Safe Workload ingests NSEL move data from Safe Firewall
Use case #2: Microsegmentation utilizing the east-west community firewall
The combination of Safe Firewall and Safe Workload supplies two highly effective complimentary strategies to find, compile, and implement zero belief microsegmentation insurance policies. The flexibility to make use of a host-based, network-based, or mixture of the 2 strategies provides you the pliability to deploy within the method that most closely fits your enterprise wants and group roles (Determine 2).
And whatever the strategy or combine, the combination lets you seamlessly leverage the complete capabilities of Safe Workload together with:
- Coverage discovery and evaluation: Routinely uncover insurance policies which are tailor-made to your surroundings by analyzing move information ingested from the Safe Firewall defending east-west workload communications.
- Coverage enforcement: Onboard a number of east-west firewalls to automate and implement microsegmentation insurance policies on a particular firewall or set of firewalls via Safe Workload. (For extra on this functionality, Topology Consciousness, learn my colleague’s weblog Topology Issues).
- Coverage compliance monitoring: The community move data, in comparison in opposition to a baseline coverage, supplies a deep view into how your purposes are behaving and complying in opposition to insurance policies over time.
Determine 2: Host-based and network-based strategy with Safe Workload
Use case #3: Protection in depth with digital patching by way of north-south community firewall
This use case demonstrates how the combination delivers protection in depth and in the end higher safety outcomes. In in the present day’s quickly evolving digital panorama, purposes play an important position in each facet of our lives. Nevertheless, with the elevated reliance on software program, cyber threats have additionally develop into extra refined and pervasive. Conventional patching strategies, though efficient, might not at all times be possible as a consequence of operational constraints and the chance of downtime. When a zero-day vulnerability is found, there are a number of completely different eventualities that play out. Contemplate two frequent eventualities: 1) A newly found CVE poses a right away threat and on this case the repair or the patch will not be obtainable and a pair of) The CVE will not be extremely vital so it’s not value patching it outdoors the standard patch window due to the manufacturing or enterprise impression. In each instances, one should settle for the interim threat and both anticipate the patch to be obtainable or for the patch window schedule.
Digital patching, a type of compensating management, is a safety follow that means that you can mitigate this threat by making use of an interim safety or a “digital” repair to recognized vulnerabilities within the software program till it has been patched or up to date. Digital patching is usually performed by leveraging the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) of Cisco Safe Firewall. The important thing functionality, fostered by the seamless integration, is Safe Workload’s capability to share CVE data with Safe Firewall, thereby activating the related IPS insurance policies for these CVEs. Let’s check out how (Determine 3):
- The Safe Workload brokers put in on the applying workloads will collect telemetry concerning the software program packages and CVEs current on the applying workloads.
- A workload-CVE mapping information is then revealed to Safe Firewall Administration Middle. You may select the precise set of CVEs you wish to publish. For instance, you’ll be able to select to solely publish CVEs which are exploitable over community as an assault vector and has CVSS rating of 10. This might let you management any potential efficiency impression in your IPS.
- Lastly, the Safe Firewall Administration Middle then runs the ‘firepower suggestions’ instrument to nice tune and allow the precise set of signatures which are wanted to supply safety in opposition to the CVEs that have been discovered in your workloads. As soon as the brand new signature set is crafted, it may be deployed to the north-south perimeter Safe Firewall.
Determine 3: Digital patching with Safe Workload and Safe Firewall
Flexibility and protection in depth is the important thing to a resilient zero belief microsegmentation technique
With Safe Workload and Safe Firewall, you’ll be able to obtain a zero-trust safety mannequin by combining a host-based and network-based enforcement strategy. As well as, with the digital patching capability, you get one other layer of protection that means that you can preserve the integrity and availability of your purposes with out sacrificing safety. Because the cyber risk panorama continues to evolve, concord between completely different safety options is undoubtedly the important thing to delivering simpler options that defend useful digital belongings.
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