Illumio Core Overview
Illumio Core is a robust and innovative segmentation solution designed to enhance cyber resilience by implementing Zero Trust Segmentation across various environments, including clouds, data centers, and endpoints.
What Illumio Core Does
Illumio Core is engineered to stop ransomware and cyberattacks from spreading by providing intelligent visibility, simplified policy creation, and automated segmentation and enforcement. This solution enables organizations to secure their workloads effectively, reducing the risk of lateral movement of threats within the network.
Key Components
1. Policy Compute Engine (PCE)
The PCE serves as the central management console and segmentation controller. It continuously collects telemetry information from the Virtual Enforcement Node (VEN), providing real-time mapping of traffic patterns and recommending optimal allow-list rules based on contextual information about the environment, workloads, and processes.
2. Virtual Enforcement Node (VEN)
The VEN is a lightweight agent installed in the guest OS of a host or endpoint. It collects flow and metadata information and transmits this data to the PCE. The VEN receives firewall rules from the PCE to program the managed host’s native stateful L3/L4 firewalls, without being inline to traffic.
Key Features and Functionality
Real-Time Visibility
Illumio Core provides comprehensive and continuous mapping of all applications, application dependencies, data, and network flows, giving organizations real-time visibility into their traffic flows and connectivity between workloads.
Simplified Policy Creation and Automation
The solution offers a radically simple policy creation engine and automated segmentation and enforcement. This allows organizations to segment their environments in minutes and accelerate their Zero Trust initiatives without the complexity associated with traditional segmentation methods.
Cyberattack Containment
Illumio Core enforces security consistently and at scale across any cloud and data center, effectively stopping ransomware and containing cyberattacks by only allowing trusted communications to move laterally across the organization.
Policy Testing and Modeling
Organizations can model and test policies before enforcement to avoid disrupting business operations or breaking applications. This ensures that security policies are validated and optimized before deployment.
Cost Efficiency and Collaboration
The solution facilitates collaboration across network, security, risk, and DevOps teams, lowering operational costs and accelerating segmentation policy deployment. It integrates with leading technologies across the security ecosystem, adding value to other critical security operations.
Core Services Detector
Illumio’s Core Services Detector feature allows for the identification of applications running on workloads by analyzing flow and associated port numbers. This information is used to associate these flows with specific applications, enhancing the accuracy of segmentation policies.
Agentless and Agent-Based Security
Illumio Core supports both agent-based and agentless approaches to workload security. The VEN agent can be deployed on managed workloads, while unmanaged workloads can be represented in the PCE to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Use Cases
Hybrid Cloud Workload Protection
Illumio Core secures all workloads across data centers, private, and public clouds from a single view, ensuring unified protection against threats.
Cloud-Native Security
The solution provides complete protection for cloud-native deployments, including containerized and traditional environments, within one integrated platform.
Micro-Segmentation for Compliance
Illumio Core helps achieve compliance by simplifying the audit process and ensuring that all necessary security measures are in place to meet regulatory requirements.
By leveraging these features and functionalities, Illumio Core enables organizations to build a robust Zero Trust architecture, enhance their security posture, and protect against evolving cyber threats efficiently.