Illumio CloudSecure brings agentless visibility and cloud-native control capability to cloud environments, and in conjunction with the Illumio Core platform, provides full visibility in management in hybrid environments as well.
PJ Kirner, Illumio’s CTO and co-founder
Today Illumio, a cybersecurity company oriented around Zero Trust Segmentation, is strengthening their cloud capabilities with the announcement of the availability of Illumio CloudSecure, a new solution. CloudSecure provides agentless visibility for the cloud, and for hybrid deployments, in conjunction with the existing Illumio Core platform, enables the building and orchestration of dynamic cloud workload policies at scale using native controls in their public cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
“A number of things are happening in the industry,” said PJ Kirner, Illumio’s CTO and co-founder. “One is all the innovation from the cloud service providers, around their managed services. Another is the trend around infrastructure as code, where different organizations are at different levels of maturity. Then there is the GitOps pipeline, where people want the actual configuration of infrastructure in the GitOps code, and want to build automation through that model. Another trend is the shift left, with security now being decentralized into the organization. The growth of multicloud and hybrid are other factors. These all brought us to the conclusion that we needed to add CloudSecure to our portfolio.”
Illumio was already in the cloud with their hybrid Illumio Core platform, but Kirner said the new trends meant that an agentless solution to provide visibility in the cloud was needed.
“Illumio Cloud focuses on collecting data about workloads with agents, but where do you put an agent on a cloud-managed database,” he asked rhetorically. “We needed an agentless way to get the same flow. CloudSecure brings an agentless piece focused on the public cloud, to have agentless-based visibility. It works along with Illumio’s Core’s agent-based on-prem infrastructure, and does both through one pane of glass. For the public cloud, it is a full solution, and for customers who are hybrid, it works together with Illumio Core. Together, hey feed one single map.”
Illumio CloudSecure gives organizations visibility into the full spectrum of their cloud-native infrastructure, cloud managed containers like AWS EKS, AWS ECS, Azure and AKS, serverless computing like AWS Lambda, cloud managed database instances such as AWS RDS, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Database, and both IaaS and PaaS resources, all through the same interface.
While the cloud visibility is a key point of the new solution, Kirner said the native cloud control is another important new innovation.
“The visibility understands how things are connected,” he stated. “The other part is native cloud control, where we provide a way to remove excessive risk, and let the customer drive from a place where they had too much risk, to a least privilege model. We had that before, but what’s new is that it is now native in the cloud.”
Kirner noted that partners should be excited about the agentless visibility.
“It can get them to a quick understanding of what’s happening in environment,” he said. “To scope out a cloud migration product, they first have to know what’s there, so this is a quick win for them. It also allow them to understand where the tentacles of an application might be, and untangle things to help it move more effectively. It’s a way to safely move something without breaking the operations of the business.”
While Illumio is just announcing GA of CloudSecure now, it has been available for a while to select customers.
“We will also be adding more to it,” Kirner said. “There are requests for other CSPs. We focus on AWS and Azure, but GCP is a roadmap item and we want to finish that, to expand our breadth. There are also depth issues on the roadmap. People need to have decisions informed by other risk indicators like data classification. There’s more to do there, on our own or by partnering with others.”
Kirner pointed out how partners can help customers who are struggling with the zero trust concept.
“It’s important for these people to start small, to find an easy thing they can do to reduce risk,” he said. “It may be small, but it’s progress. They need to break it down into small wins to demonstrate success, and there’s a great opportunity for channel partners to get in with something like that to get them started.”
