Constructing community and workload safety architectures is usually a daunting process. It entails not solely selecting the best resolution with the suitable set of capabilities, but in addition making certain that the options supply the proper degree of resilience.
Resilience is usually thought-about a community operate, the place the community should be sturdy sufficient to deal with failures and supply alternate paths for transmitting and receiving knowledge. Nevertheless, resilience on the endpoint or workload degree is regularly neglected. As a part of constructing a resilient structure, it’s important to incorporate and plan for situations wherein the endpoint or workload resolution would possibly 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 resolution to guard software workloads, the dialogue usually revolves round mapping enterprise necessities to technical capabilities. These capabilities sometimes embody safety features similar to microsegmentation and runtime visibility. Nevertheless, one facet that’s usually neglected is the agent structure.
Usually, 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 software workloads, even within the occasion of an agent malfunction, thus stopping crashes within the software workloads.
This robustness is because of our agent structure, which operates fully in userspace with out affecting the community datapath or the appliance libraries. Due to this fact, if the agent had been to fail, the appliance would proceed to operate as regular, avoiding disruption to the enterprise.
One other facet of the agent structure is that it was designed to provide directors management over how, when, and which brokers they need to improve by leveraging configuration profiles. This method supplies the flexibleness to roll out upgrades in a staged trend, permitting for essential testing earlier than going into manufacturing.
Agentless-Based mostly Approaches
One of the simplest ways to guard your software workloads is undoubtedlythrough an agent-based method, because it yields one of the best outcomes. Nevertheless, there are cases the place putting in an agent is just not doable.
The primary drivers for selecting agentless options usually relate to organizational dependencies (e.g., cross-departmental collaboration), or in sure circumstances, the appliance workload’s working system is unsupported (e.g., legacy OS, customized OS).
When choosing agentless options, it’s necessary to know the restrictions of those approaches. As an illustration, with out an agent, it isn’t doable to realize runtime visibility of software workloads.
However, the chosen resolution should nonetheless present the required safety features, similar to complete community visibility of site visitors flows and community segmentation to safeguard the appliance workloads.
Safe Workload gives a holistic method to getting visibility from a number of sources similar to:
- IPFIX
- NetFlow
- Safe Firewall NSEL
- Safe Consumer Telemetry
- Cloud Circulate Logs
- Cisco ISE
- F5 and Citrix
- ERSPAN
- DPUs (Knowledge Processing Items)
… and it gives 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 resolution, at all times take note the dangers, together with the menace panorama and the resilience of the answer itself. With Safe Workload, you get:
- Resilient Agent Structure
- Utility runtime visibility and enforcement with microsegmentation
- Various characteristic set of agentless enforcement
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