HealthMatters
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 forestall unauthorized lateral motion throughout community sources. 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 method, even when a breach happens or a possible risk positive factors entry to a useful resource, the blast radius is contained.
And like many safety practices, there are other ways to realize the target, and sometimes a lot of it depends upon the distinctive buyer atmosphere. For microsegmentation, the secret’s to have a trusted accomplice that not solely supplies a strong safety resolution however provides you the pliability to adapt to your wants as a substitute of forcing a “one dimension matches all” method.
Now, there are broadly two completely different approaches you may take to realize your microsegmentation goals:
- A bunch-based enforcement method 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 method the place the insurance policies are enforced on a community machine like an east-west community firewall or a swap.
Whereas a host-based enforcement method is immensely highly effective as a result of it supplies entry to wealthy telemetry when it comes to processes, packages, and CVEs operating on the workloads, it might not at all times be a practical method for a myriad of causes. These causes can vary from software crew perceptions, community safety crew preferences, or just the necessity for a special method to realize 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 strong 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 prospects with unmatched flexibility in addition to protection in depth. Let’s take a deeper have a look at what this integration permits our prospects to realize and a number of the use circumstances.
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 may’t see, you may’t shield.” Within the context of microsegmentation, circulation visibility supplies the muse for constructing a blueprint of how functions talk with one another, in addition to customers and gadgets – each inside and out of doors the datacenter.
The mixing between Safe Workload and Safe Firewall permits the ingestion of NSEL circulation data to supply community circulation visibility, as proven in Determine 1. You possibly can additional enrich this community circulation knowledge by bringing in context within the type of labels and tags from exterior methods like CMDB, IPAM, id sources, and so on. This contextually enriched knowledge set lets you rapidly establish the communication patterns and any indicators of compromise throughout your software panorama, enabling you to instantly enhance your safety posture.
Determine 1: Safe Workload ingests NSEL circulation data from Safe Firewall
Use case #2: Microsegmentation utilizing the east-west community firewall
The mixing 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 what you are promoting wants and crew roles (Determine 2).
And whatever the method or combine, the mixing lets you seamlessly leverage the complete capabilities of Safe Workload together with:
- Coverage discovery and evaluation: Mechanically uncover insurance policies which might 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 by way of Safe Workload. (For extra on this functionality, Topology Consciousness, learn my colleague’s weblog Topology Issues).
- Coverage compliance monitoring: The community circulation data, in comparison in opposition to a baseline coverage, supplies a deep view into how your functions are behaving and complying in opposition to insurance policies over time.
Determine 2: Host-based and network-based method with Safe Workload
Use case #3: Protection in depth with digital patching through north-south community firewall
This use case demonstrates how the mixing delivers protection in depth and finally higher safety outcomes. In at this time’s quickly evolving digital panorama, functions play an important function in each side 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 consequence of operational constraints and the chance of downtime. When a zero-day vulnerability is found, there are just a few completely different eventualities that play out. Think about two widespread eventualities: 1) A newly found CVE poses a right away threat and on this case the repair or the patch will not be accessible and a couple of) The CVE will not be extremely important so it’s not value patching it exterior the standard patch window due to the manufacturing or enterprise affect. In each circumstances, one should settle for the interim threat and both look forward to the patch to be accessible or for the patch window schedule.
Digital patching, a type of compensating management, is a safety follow that lets you 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 often 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 appliance workloads will collect telemetry concerning 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 possibly can select the precise set of CVEs you need to publish. For instance, you may select to solely publish CVEs which might be exploitable over community as an assault vector and has CVSS rating of 10. This could help you management any potential efficiency affect in your IPS.
- Lastly, the Safe Firewall Administration Heart then runs the ‘firepower suggestions’ device to advantageous tune and allow the precise set of signatures which might be wanted to supply safety in opposition to the CVEs that had 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 may obtain a zero-trust safety mannequin by combining a host-based and network-based enforcement method. As well as, with the digital patching capability, you get one other layer of protection that lets you keep the integrity and availability of your functions 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 more practical options that shield helpful digital property.
Study 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 Under, and Keep Linked with Cisco Safety on social!
Cisco Safety Social Channels
Share:
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings