Akamai Technologies is extending its Guardicore Segmentation solution to hybrid cloud environments. The move aims to reduce attack surfaces and confine attacks on cloud-native workloads.

Guardicore Segmentation's extension to cloud services takes advantage of the solution's ability to improve visibility into application behaviour, implement multiple policies across cloud providers, and reconcile governance issues between DevOps and SecOps teams.

Administrators utilising Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in the cloud can visualise cloud workloads using a near-real-time interactive map of true network flows. This comprehensive agentless cloud-native visibility and enforcement allow better understanding of application dependencies and foster tighter collaboration between DevOps and SecOps teams in cloud network security governance.

The segmentation tool features a hybrid enforcement engine which utilises multiple enforcement points, enabling administrators to straightforwardly define network policy intents. “The Akamai Guardicore Segmentation policy engine takes care of the rest, dynamically deciding which agent-based and agentless enforcement points are used across the data centre,” says the press release.

It is also integrated with reputation analysis and threat intelligence firewall attributes, designed to reduce the time for detection and incident response in breach scenarios. As a scalable and secure solution, it ensures data doesn't leave the cloud environment and its architecture automatically scales within it.

The Akamai Guardicore Segmentation solution will be first available to public-cloud customers through Microsoft Azure Marketplace and later through Akamai Connected Cloud.

The move comes as 33% of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) plan to ramp up their usage of distributed cloud services to strengthen security and dependability, according to a study commissioned by Akamai and conducted by ClearPath Strategies. However, the report also disclosed that almost half (48%) of ITDMs found that security tools to protect workloads in the cloud were either absent or insufficient. This underscores the pressing need for more robust security instruments.

Public and multi-cloud environments are critical to the majority of organisations, according to Pavel Gurvich, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Enterprise Security at Akamai. However, these environments lack the requisite visibility and security controls to be properly safeguarded. “Applying a microsegmentation policy in the cloud can give security practitioners comprehensive visibility and control across all cloud environments, from a single interface with one set of controls, without the need for agents,” Gurvich said. This provides protection for business-critical applications, whether they are on-premise, in the cloud, or on legacy servers, and minimises the number of security solutions to be managed.