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NEW TECH: ‘Micro-segmentation’ security vendor Guardicore seeks to disrupt firewall market

by bacohido on March 30, 2020

Agile software innovation is the order of the day. Wonderous digital services are the result.

The flip side, of course, is that an already wide-open attack surface – one that has been getting plundered for the past two decades by criminal hacking groups — is getting scaled up, as well.

Enter micro-segmentation; or microsegmentation, depending on which cybersecurity vendor you’re talking to.

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Micro-segmentation is a fresh approach to defending company networks that is actually a throwback to a 30-year-old security concept, called network segmentation. It’s a way to replace the clunky controls that were designed to cordon off certain zones of on-premises IT infrastructure with sleek, software-defined controls that are more fitting for the hybrid cloud networks that will take us forward.

Micro-segmentation got a lot of attention at RSA 2020. I had the chance to learn more about how it works, and why it holds so much promise, in a visit with Pavel Gurvich, co-founder and chief executive officer of Tel Aviv, Israel-based Guardicore, one of the leading players in this space. For a full drill down on our conversation, give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here are the key takeaways:

Micro-managing workloads

Companies today are immersed in digital transformation; they’re migrating to cloud-based business systems, going all in on mobile services and embracing Internet of Things systems whole hog. DevOps has taken center stage. Software innovation happens by combining “microservices” within “software containers” that circulate in virtual “storage buckets,” spun up in Amazon Web Services (AWS,) Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Microsegmentation is a way for companies to put eyes on just about any type of workload, no matter how small or fleeting, and ultimately apply automated controls to a given micro zone. It gives system administrators a way to secure each microsegment, separately.

Gurvich

“Once your control plane is, essentially, everywhere, on every workload, you can build almost a single bubble around every server,” Gurvich told me. “You can also do that on an application, or a tier of an application, or on a business unit … and the policy gets distributed from a central location.”

Gurvich described a few leading-edge capabilities of Guardicore’s flagship Centra Security Platform. “We’ve also added a unique visibility component that enables you to understand how your network behaves, how your applications are interacting with each other, and what processes are running on what servers,” he says. “That map enables us to set the right policies in place, based on how file applications really behave. So we don’t break anything or leave too many things open, like a firewall might do.”

Disrupting firewalls

Gurvich makes no bones about the fact that Guardicore has set out to disrupt a portion of the $9 billion firewall market. He asserts that legacy perimeter defenses are ineffective at deploying granular policies quickly and at scale, which means they do little to shrink the attack surface or maintain compliance. The Centra platform, he says, can replace legacy firewalls, and improved protection of on-premises data centers, as well as cloud assets.

Guardicore appears to be onto something. The company has attracted $110 million in venture funding, grown to 180 employees and achieved year over year revenue growth of 250 percent for three years running. It has managed to do this in a hot space that includes other micro-segmentation innovators like tech stalwarts Cisco and VMWare, as well as rival startups Illumio and vArmor, among about a dozen other vendors.

Gurvich further argues that if one were to put micro-segmentation aside, companies that are accelerating their cloud migration have two anemic choices: they can stick with basic segmentation services offered by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, or they can deploy a virtual, cloud firewall from one of the big firewall vendors. That’s far less than ideal, he contends.

“What ends up happening is that you have a super agile, elastic environment in the cloud, which is just completely constrained by a piece of inadequate infrastructure,” he says. “You end up creating a network choke point.”

Improved visibility

With traditional firewalls, policy updates take forever, app development bogs down, attack vectors remain open and criminal hackers, in effect, operate with impunity.

“This is completely contradictory to the reasons companies are moving to the cloud,” he says. “Our customers use Centra to protect their servers as they are moving to the cloud; they’re able to retain agility and speed when deploying new code and new applications.”

Clearly agility and speed are cornerstones of digital transformation. Micro-segmentation, as I now understand it, can supply visibility in key spots: the intersections of micro zones. And it gives companies a means to direct machine learning and automation towards implementing smarter policies at these intersections. I can see how this could improve both performance and security.

The traction micro-segmentation vendors, like Guardicore, are gaining suggests there’s room for an improved approach to doing firewalls – one that’s better suited to hybrid cloud networks. I’m eager to see where this goes. I’ll keep watch.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)