Let’s explore the necessary strategies for strong cloud workload security.
Microsegmentation is a method of creating secure, secluded zones within a data center, network, or cloud environment that allows workloads to be individually isolated and secured. It’s designed to enable granular partitioning of traffic for better protection from attacks.
With microsegmentation, IT security teams can tailor security settings to different types of traffic, creating policies that limit flows between workloads to those that are explicitly permitted. Applying segmentation rules and granular policies down to the workload or application can reduce the risk of an attacker moving undetected from one compromised workload or application to another.
This is not to be confused with network segmentation, which involves using stateful inspection firewalls or next-generation firewalls to split the network into smaller, more easily monitored chunks. This strategy has been effective in the past, but it has particular limitations for cloud and multicloud environments.
Another key strategy is zero trust network access (ZTNA), also known as a software-defined perimeter (SDP). ZTNA is achieved with a set of technologies that operate on an adaptive trust model, where trust is never implicit, users must be verified, and access is granted on a need-to-know, least-privileged basis defined by granular policies.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, 60% of enterprises will phase out their remote access virtual private networks (VPN) in favor of ZTNA. This is true for a number of reasons—not least for improved protection and security for cloud workloads.
Microsegmentation and ZTNA can both help secure an organization’s traffic and applications at runtime, but using a cloud workload protection platform will ensure full cloud workload security coverage.