Constructing community and workload safety architectures generally is a daunting activity. It includes not solely selecting the best answer with the suitable set of capabilities, but in addition making certain that the options provide the correct degree of resilience.
Resilience is usually thought-about a community operate, the place the community have to be strong sufficient to deal with failures and provide alternate paths for transmitting and receiving information. Nevertheless, resilience on the endpoint or workload degree is incessantly missed. As a part of constructing a resilient structure, it’s important to incorporate and plan for situations through which the endpoint or workload answer may fail.
After we study the present panorama of options, it normally boils down to 2 totally different approaches:
Agent-Based mostly Approaches
When selecting a safety answer to guard utility workloads, the dialogue typically revolves round mapping enterprise necessities to technical capabilities. These capabilities usually embody security measures comparable to microsegmentation and runtime visibility. Nevertheless, one side that’s typically missed is the agent structure.
Typically, there are two principal approaches to agent-based architectures:
- Userspace putting in Kernel-Based mostly Modules/Drivers (in-datapath)
- Userspace clear to the Kernel (off-datapath)
Safe Workload’s agent structure was designed from the bottom as much as shield utility workloads, even within the occasion of an agent malfunction, thus stopping crashes within the utility workloads.
This robustness is because of our agent structure, which operates fully in userspace with out affecting the community datapath or the applying libraries. Due to this fact, if the agent have been to fail, the applying would proceed to operate as regular, avoiding disruption to the enterprise.
One other side of the agent structure is that it was designed to provide directors management over how, when, and which brokers they wish to improve by leveraging configuration profiles. This method offers the pliability to roll out upgrades in a staged trend, permitting for crucial testing earlier than going into manufacturing.
Agentless-Based mostly Approaches
One of the best ways to guard your utility workloads is undoubtedlythrough an agent-based method, because it yields the perfect outcomes. Nevertheless, there are cases the place putting in an agent isn’t potential.
The principle drivers for selecting agentless options typically relate to organizational dependencies (e.g., cross-departmental collaboration), or in sure circumstances, the applying workload’s working system is unsupported (e.g., legacy OS, customized OS).
When choosing agentless options, it’s essential to grasp the restrictions of those approaches. As an illustration, with out an agent, it isn’t potential to attain runtime visibility of utility workloads.
Nonetheless, the chosen answer should nonetheless present the required security measures, comparable to complete community visibility of site visitors flows and community segmentation to safeguard the applying workloads.
Safe Workload presents a holistic method to getting visibility from a number of sources comparable to:
- IPFIX
- NetFlow
- Safe Firewall NSEL
- Safe Consumer Telemetry
- Cloud Move Logs
- Cisco ISE
- F5 and Citrix
- ERSPAN
- DPUs (Knowledge Processing Items)
… and it presents a number of methods to implement this coverage:
- Safe Firewall
- Cloud Safety Teams
- DPUs (Knowledge Processing Items)
Key Takeaways
When selecting the best community and workload microsegmentation answer, at all times take into account the dangers, together with the risk panorama and the resilience of the answer itself. With Safe Workload, you get:
- Resilient Agent Structure
- Software runtime visibility and enforcement with microsegmentation
- Numerous function set of agentless enforcement
Study extra about Cisco Safe Workload
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