After I take 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, utility 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 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 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? Properly, this is dependent upon a number of elements, together with organizations, kind of utility, or crew construction. So, let’s begin untangling this.
The problem(s)
Essentially the most direct method 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 important.
Nevertheless, it isn’t all the time potential to put in a software program agent. Maybe it’s a mainframe utility or a legacy working system that requires fine-grained insurance policies as a result of a compliance mandate. Or utility workloads which can be within the cloud and the agent set up is just not potential as a result of organizational constraints.
And this isn’t the one problem or consideration for selecting your method. The groups or teams that comprise any firm typically have completely different safety necessities from one another, resulting in the triad problem: folks, processes, and know-how.
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 utility workloads, and an outlined course of to implement these necessities within the coverage. To help this, a device (know-how) 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 essential ask your self:
- What are we defending?
- Who’s the proprietor of the insurance policies?
- How is coverage execution performed?
For example:
Say you need to shield a finance utility (what) utilizing an agent-based method (how), and the proprietor of the insurance policies is the App Crew/Workload Crew (who). On this situation, so long as the appliance doesn’t break and the crew 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. This can be a frequent byproduct of the interpretation course of.
Now, let’s assume that in your group the safety of a legacy utility (what) is tasked to the Community/NetSec crew (who) utilizing an agentless enforcement method with community firewalls (how) as a result of on this case, it isn’t potential to put in software program brokers because of the unsupported legacy working system. As within the first instance, additional guidelines are generated. Nevertheless, on this case, these pointless additional guidelines create adverse penalties due to firewall guidelines auditing necessities for compliance mandates, despite the fact that they’re a part of the frequent coverage.
Topology because the supply of fact – pushing solely what’s required
Cisco Safe Workload has been addressing the folks, course of, and know-how 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 through the use of agentless enforcement factors similar 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 utility workloads in help 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 crew, solely utilizing the coverage guidelines which can be required.
To sort out the extra guidelines problem, we requested ourselves, “What’s the most effective strategy 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 based mostly on context, the place you possibly can group your purposes and outline your coverage through the use of human intent. For instance, “Manufacturing can’t discuss to Non-Manufacturing” and apply the coverage following the topology hierarchy.
The Scope Tree is the topology of your utility workloads throughout the group, however the bottom line 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 particular firewall within the community topology, so solely the related set of insurance policies for a given utility 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 the use 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 document of constructing this a sensible actuality by adapting to the wants of every persona similar to Community/NetSec admins, Workload/Apps homeowners, Cloud Architects, and Cloud-Native engineers – all from one resolution.
With topology consciousness, you possibly can:
- 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 sources.
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