You hear loads about zero belief microsegmentation lately and rightly so. It has matured right into a confirmed safety best-practice to successfully forestall unauthorized lateral motion throughout community assets. It includes dividing your community into remoted segments, or “microsegments,” the place every phase has its personal set of safety insurance policies and controls. On this manner, 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 alternative ways to attain the target, and usually a lot of it relies on the distinctive buyer atmosphere. For microsegmentation, the hot button is to have a trusted companion that not solely offers a sturdy safety resolution however provides you the flexibleness to adapt to your wants as an alternative of forcing a “one measurement matches all” strategy.
Now, there are broadly two totally different approaches you’ll be able to take to attain your microsegmentation aims:
- A bunch-based enforcement strategy the place the insurance policies are enforced on the workload itself. This may be achieved 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 system like an east-west community firewall or a swap.
Whereas a host-based enforcement strategy is immensely highly effective as a result of it offers entry to wealthy telemetry when it comes to processes, packages, and CVEs working on the workloads, it might not at all times be a practical 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 quick, to make microsegmentation sensible and achievable, it’s clear {that a} dynamic duo of host and network-based safety is vital to a sturdy and resilient zero belief cybersecurity technique. Earlier this 12 months, Cisco accomplished the native integration between Cisco Safe Workload and Cisco Safe Firewall delivering on this precept and offering clients with unmatched flexibility in addition to protection in depth. Let’s take a deeper have a look at what this integration permits our clients to attain and a few of the use instances.
Use case #1: Community visibility through an east-west community firewall
The journey to microsegmentation begins with visibility. It is 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 shield.” Within the context of microsegmentation, circulation visibility offers the muse for constructing a blueprint of how purposes talk with one another, in addition to customers and units – each inside and out of doors the datacenter.
The mixing between Safe Workload and Safe Firewall permits the ingestion of NSEL circulation information to offer community circulation visibility, as proven in Determine 1. You may additional enrich this community circulation knowledge by bringing in context within the type of labels and tags from exterior techniques like CMDB, IPAM, id sources, and so forth. This contextually enriched knowledge set permits you to rapidly 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 circulation information from Safe Firewall
Use case #2: Microsegmentation utilizing the east-west community firewall
The mixing of Safe Firewall and Safe Workload offers 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 flexibleness to deploy within the method that most accurately fits what you are promoting 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: Mechanically uncover insurance policies which can be tailor-made to your atmosphere by analyzing circulation knowledge 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 selected 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 circulation data, compared towards a baseline coverage, offers a deep view into how your purposes are behaving and complying towards insurance policies over time.
Determine 2: Host-based and network-based strategy with Safe Workload
Use case #3: Protection in depth with digital patching through north-south community firewall
This use case demonstrates how the combination delivers protection in depth and finally higher safety outcomes. In at this time’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 turn out to be extra refined and pervasive. Conventional patching strategies, though efficient, might not at all times be possible as a result of operational constraints and the chance of downtime. When a zero-day vulnerability is found, there are a number of totally different eventualities that play out. Contemplate two widespread eventualities: 1) A newly found CVE poses an instantaneous threat and on this case the repair or the patch is just not out there and a pair of) The CVE is just not extremely crucial so it’s not value patching it exterior the standard patch window due to the manufacturing or enterprise affect. In each instances, one should settle for the interim threat and both look forward to the patch to be out there or for the patch window schedule.
Digital patching, a type of compensating management, is a safety apply that permits you to mitigate this threat by making use of an interim safety or a “digital” repair to identified vulnerabilities within the software program till it has been patched or up to date. Digital patching is usually achieved by leveraging the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) of Cisco Safe Firewall. The important thing functionality, fostered by the seamless integration, is Safe Workload’s potential 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 appliance workloads will collect telemetry in regards to the software program packages and CVEs current on the appliance workloads.
- A workload-CVE mapping knowledge is then printed to Safe Firewall Administration Heart. 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 can be exploitable over community as an assault vector and has CVSS rating of 10. This may can help you management any potential efficiency affect in your IPS.
- Lastly, the Safe Firewall Administration Heart then runs the ‘firepower suggestions’ software to effective tune and allow the precise set of signatures which can be wanted to offer safety towards 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 potential, you get one other layer of protection that permits you to keep the integrity and availability of your purposes with out sacrificing safety. Because the cyber risk panorama continues to evolve, concord between totally different safety options is undoubtedly the important thing to delivering simpler options that shield precious digital property.
Be taught extra about Cisco Safe Workload and Cisco Safe Firewall
Join a Safe Workload workshop
We’d love to listen to what you assume. Ask a Query, Remark Beneath, and Keep Related with Cisco Safety on social!
Cisco Safety Social Channels
Share: