Illumio Overview
Illumio is a pioneering company in the field of Zero Trust Segmentation, offering a comprehensive platform designed to protect organizations from cyber threats, particularly breaches and ransomware attacks, by visualizing and controlling the communication between workloads and devices.
What Illumio Does
Illumio’s primary goal is to assume a breach has already occurred and minimize its impact by containing and isolating the threat. The Illumio Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) and its various modules, such as Illumio Core, CloudSecure, and Endpoint, work together to achieve this.
Key Features
- Visibility: Illumio provides deep visibility into how workloads and devices communicate across different environments, including data centers, cloud applications, and endpoints. This visibility is facilitated through tools like Illumination, which creates a live application dependency map showing workloads, applications, traffic flows, and vulnerabilities.
- Segmentation: The platform enables granular segmentation policies that allow only necessary communication between workloads. This microsegmentation is applied at the workload level, independent of the underlying network infrastructure, such as VLANs, subnets, or zones. This approach prevents the lateral movement of attacks and isolates compromised systems effectively.
- Enforcement: Illumio ASP enforces security policies across various environments, including bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containerized hosts. Policies can be written in natural language based on the role, application, environment, and location of the workload, which are then translated into granular security rules without the need for specifying IP addresses or network details.
Key Features and Functionality
Illumio Core
- Traffic Visibility: Provides an application dependency map, traffic flow telemetry, and historical records to offer actionable insights for allowing or denying traffic.
- Rapid Response: Enables the enforcement of specific policies in minutes to reduce the impact of a breach and stop the spread of ransomware.
- Intelligent Policy Creation: Automatically discovers and identifies key services, recommending labels and Zero Trust Segmentation policies to protect them.
- Vulnerable Service Identification: Overlays data from vulnerability scanning tools with the Illumio dependency map to highlight unknown connections and vulnerabilities.
- Scalable Segmentation: Designed to scale across environments, from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of workloads.
- User-Friendly Dashboards: Offers reports and a protection score to give visibility into current ransomware risk and measurable risk reduction.
Illumio CloudSecure
- Focuses on securing cloud applications and workloads, ensuring that the same level of segmentation and protection is applied in cloud environments as in on-premises data centers.
Illumio Endpoint
- Extends the Zero Trust Segmentation to devices, ensuring that endpoints are protected with the same granular policies as workloads in data centers and cloud environments.
Additional Capabilities
- Map and Traffic Tools: These tools provide a visual map of all traffic flows and summarize network traffic between workloads, helping to understand traffic dependencies across business-defined boundaries rather than network boundaries.
- Adaptive Security: Illumio ASP adapts to changes in the computing environment, including the movement of workloads across data centers and clouds, and IP address changes, ensuring continuous protection.
Benefits
- Eliminate Blind Spots: Illumio eliminates blind spots inside data centers and the cloud, regaining control over the application environment.
- Protect Invisible Traffic: It protects the 80% of data center and cloud traffic that is invisible to perimeter firewalls.
- Prevent Lateral Movement: Prevents the lateral spread of attacks by enforcing microsegmentation policies.
- Rapid Containment: Isolates compromised systems more effectively than firewalls alone, stopping small incidents from turning into disasters.
In summary, Illumio offers a robust Zero Trust Segmentation platform that enhances an organization’s cybersecurity posture by providing unparalleled visibility, granular segmentation, and rapid response capabilities, ensuring that breaches and ransomware attacks are contained and their impact minimized.