Akamai Technologies, the cloud company, has announced the extension of its segmentation solution, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, to hybrid cloud environments. This move is expected to help reduce attack surfaces and contain assaults targeting cloud-native workloads. Notably, Akamai's extended solution will initially be available for Microsoft Azure deployments via Azure Marketplace, with Akamai Connected Cloud following later this year.

The decision to extend this segmentation solution comes in response to the increasing number of businesses adopting multi-cloud strategies and the subsequent need to secure these cloud environments effectively. Applying a micro-segmentation policy in the cloud can provide security practitioners with comprehensive visibility and control across all cloud environments via a single interface with one set of controls, eliminating the need for agents.

According to a recent survey commissioned by Akamai and carried out by ClearPath Strategies, 33% of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) intended to bolster their use of distributed cloud services to enhance security and reliability. However, nearly half (48%) of the respondents stated that security tools were inadequate or underdeveloped for a distributed cloud world. This indicates a pressing need for improved security tools to safeguard workloads in the cloud.

By utilizing Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in the cloud, organisations can address several challenges, including a lack of visibility into application behaviour, the need for numerous policies across cloud providers, and governance issues bridging DevOps and SecOps teams. While public and multi-cloud environments are essential to most business operations, they lack the native visibility and security controls necessary to secure a cloud effectively.

Pavel Gurvich, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Enterprise Security at Akamai, emphasised the importance of comprehensive visibility and control over cloud environments. He explained, "For clouds to be secure, security practitioners must be able to see which applications, workloads, and traffic flows are moving within the environment. We can protect business-critical applications – whether they are on-premises, in the cloud, or on legacy servers – while reducing the number of security solutions that need to be managed."

Benefits of leveraging Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in the cloud include comprehensive agentless cloud-native visibility and enforcement, a hybrid enforcement engine utilising multiple enforcement points, integrated reputation analysis and threat intelligence firewall capabilities, and a scalable and secure solution. These benefits enable administrators to understand application dependencies and unify DevOps and SecOps teams in cloud network security governance. Simultaneously, they ensure data remains within your cloud environment while the solution architecture scales automatically within it.