Cloud security posture management tools help in the identification and remediation of risks across cloud infrastructures, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). These tools continuously assess the security posture across multi-cloud environments by maintaining a current inventory of the cloud assets for proactive analysis and risk assessment to detect any misconfigurations. Once these misconfigurations are identified, security controls are developed and implemented. CSPM solutions also integrate with DevOps tools, streamlining the incident response process and ensuring continuous compliance with regulatory requirements and security frameworks by providing visibility of the cloud environment’s security posture.
Gartner defines microsegmentation as the ability to insert a security policy into the access layer between any two workloads in the same extended data center. Microsegmentation technologies enable the definition of fine-grained network zones, down to individual assets and applications. Core capabilities include: - Flow mapping, which is the ability to gather and show North/South and East/West traffic flows and use them in the policy definition (it can present this data in a visual manner) - Workload isolation, which is isolation from other workloads based on security policy - Policy enforcement, including the definition of rules based on different factors - The ability to deploy in the virtualized and infrastructure as a service environments Some of the most frequent optional capabilities of microsegmentation technologies include: - Automation of the deployment as part of a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline - Integration with cloud infrastructure to ease deployment, enforce rules or automate policy updates when new assets are deployed - Asset discovery: adjacent to the flow mapping, microsegmentation tools can show more advanced context for the assets - Policy recommendation engine: complementary to the asset discovery, microsegmentation technology can suggest policy rules to authorize discovered flows - Threat detection: based on threat intelligence, layer seven protocol inspection and anomaly detection - Interoperability through direct integration with third-party products, such as a firewall, and hardware, such as switches and routers - Internet of Things (IoT)/operational technology (OT) coverage — the solution supports microsegmentation for IoT/OT infrastructure - Kubernetes/Container coverage — the solution supports microsegmentation for containers/K8s
Network automation platforms are products that automate and orchestrate multiple vendors’ network functionality. These platforms support a broad range of capabilities including provisioning, deprovisioning, orchestration, troubleshooting, operations, workflow, configuration management, event-driven automation, validation and reporting. These platforms are well-suited to add value on top of existing point network automation tools by orchestrating end-to-end network workflows across existing automation tools. Network automation platforms interact directly with network devices, other automation and orchestration tools, network management systems/controllers, and/or network services. These platforms increase agility and efficiency of network infrastructure while lowering costs, reducing the amount of manual human errors, and improving compliance with required rules, regulations and laws.