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 developed to supply a various set of options (i.e., IPS, decryption, software detection) to deeply analyze visitors coming out and in of the community to guard workloads. Nonetheless, whereas firewalls are very succesful home equipment, it has been confirmed that they don’t seem to be 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 section. 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 methods to construct a micro-perimeter across the workloads.
Which strategy is the right one to take? Nicely, this depends upon a number of components, together with organizations, sort of software, or crew construction. So, let’s begin untangling this.
The problem(s)
Probably the most direct strategy to guard purposes 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 critical.
Nonetheless, it’s not at all times attainable to put in a software program agent. Maybe it’s a mainframe software or a legacy working system that requires fine-grained insurance policies resulting from a compliance mandate. Or software workloads which might be within the cloud and the agent set up is solely not attainable resulting from organizational constraints.
And this isn’t the one problem or consideration for selecting your strategy. The groups or teams that comprise any firm usually have completely different safety necessities from one another, resulting in the triad problem: individuals, processes, and expertise.
Let’s begin with individuals (coverage proprietor) and course of (coverage execution). Often, 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 software (expertise) is required, which should adapt to every group’s wants and must be able to defining a typical coverage throughout agent and agentless workloads.
To begin unwrapping this, you could ask your self:
- What are we defending?
- Who’s the proprietor of the insurance policies?
- How is coverage execution executed?
For example:
Say you need to shield a finance software (what) utilizing an agent-based strategy (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 crew can proceed to concentrate on coding, that is usually an appropriate strategy. Nonetheless, when implementing the widespread coverage, the interpretation from human language to machine language tends to generate additional guidelines that aren’t essentially required. This can be a widespread 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 crew (who) utilizing an agentless enforcement strategy with community firewalls (how) as a result of on this case, it’s not attainable to put in software program brokers because of the unsupported legacy working system. As within the first instance, additional guidelines are generated. Nonetheless, on this case, these pointless additional guidelines create unfavorable penalties due to firewall guidelines auditing necessities for compliance mandates, regardless that they’re a part of the widespread coverage.
Topology because the supply of reality – pushing solely what’s required
Cisco Safe Workload has been addressing the individuals, course of, and expertise challenges since its inception. The answer embraces each approaches – putting in software program brokers on workloads no matter type issue (bare-metal, VM, or container) or by utilizing agentless enforcement factors corresponding to 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 strategy. All inside a single pane of glass.
Nonetheless, as defined within the instance above, we nonetheless wanted to align our coverage to the compliance wants of the Community/NetSec crew, solely utilizing the coverage guidelines which might be required.
To deal with the extra guidelines problem, we requested ourselves, “What’s the best strategy to push insurance policies right into a community firewall utilizing Safe Workload?”
The reply boiled right down to a typical 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 possibly can group your purposes and outline your coverage by utilizing human intent. For instance, “Manufacturing can not speak to Non-Manufacturing” and apply the coverage following the topology hierarchy.
The Scope Tree is the topology of your software workloads inside the group, however the secret is that it may be formed for various departments or organizational wants and tailored to every crew’s safety necessities.
The idea of mapping a workload Scope to a community firewall is known as “Topology Consciousness.”
Topology Consciousness permits the Community/NetSec groups to map a specific Scope to a selected 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 seem like? 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 Heart (FMC). To take care of 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 isn’t trivial, however Safe Workload has a confirmed observe report of constructing this a sensible actuality by adapting to the wants of every persona corresponding to Community/NetSec admins, Workload/Apps house owners, Cloud Architects, and Cloud-Native engineers – all from one resolution.
With topology consciousness, you possibly can:
- Meet compliance and audit necessities for firewall guidelines
- Defend 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
Need to study extra? Discover out extra at by testing our Safe Workload assets.
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