Constructing community and workload safety architectures could be a daunting job. It entails not solely selecting the best resolution with the suitable set of capabilities, but in addition guaranteeing that the options supply the fitting degree of resilience.
Resilience is usually thought of a community operate, the place the community have to be strong sufficient to deal with failures and supply alternate paths for transmitting and receiving knowledge. Nevertheless, resilience on the endpoint or workload degree is steadily ignored. As a part of constructing a resilient structure, it’s important to incorporate and plan for situations during which the endpoint or workload resolution would possibly fail.
Once 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 usually embody safety features comparable to microsegmentation and runtime visibility. Nevertheless, one facet that’s usually ignored is the agent structure.
Typically, there are two predominant 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 applying libraries. Subsequently, if the agent have been to fail, the applying 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 wish to improve by leveraging configuration profiles. This strategy offers the pliability to roll out upgrades in a staged trend, permitting for needed testing earlier than going into manufacturing.
Agentless-Based mostly Approaches
One of the best ways to guard your software workloads is undoubtedlythrough an agent-based strategy, because it yields the perfect outcomes. Nevertheless, there are cases the place putting in an agent isn’t doable.
The primary drivers for selecting agentless options usually relate to organizational dependencies (e.g., cross-departmental collaboration), or in sure circumstances, the applying workload’s working system is unsupported (e.g., legacy OS, customized OS).
When choosing agentless options, it’s essential to know the constraints of those approaches. For example, with out an agent, it’s not doable to attain runtime visibility of software workloads.
However, the chosen resolution should nonetheless present the required safety features, comparable to complete community visibility of visitors flows and community segmentation to safeguard the applying workloads.
Safe Workload presents a holistic strategy to getting visibility from a number of sources comparable to:
- IPFIX
- NetFlow
- Safe Firewall NSEL
- Safe Shopper Telemetry
- Cloud Circulate Logs
- Cisco ISE
- F5 and Citrix
- ERSPAN
- DPUs (Information Processing Models)
… and it presents a number of methods to implement this coverage:
- Safe Firewall
- Cloud Safety Teams
- DPUs (Information Processing Models)
Key Takeaways
When selecting the best community and workload microsegmentation resolution, all the time bear in mind the dangers, together with the menace panorama and the resilience of the answer itself. With Safe Workload, you get:
- Resilient Agent Structure
- Software runtime visibility and enforcement with microsegmentation
- Various characteristic set of agentless enforcement
Study extra about Cisco Safe Workload
We’d love to listen to what you assume. Ask a Query, Remark Under, and Keep Related with Cisco Safety on social!
Cisco Safety Social Channels
Share:
