Illumio & Netskope join forces to bolster Zero Trust security

Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) specialist Illumio and Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), have announced a strategic partnership aimed at enhancing enterprise resilience against cyberattacks through the integration of their respective Zero Trust solutions.

The partnership leverages Illumio's ZTS with Netskope's Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) Next via the Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) platform. This relationship aims to aid network and security teams in creating zero-trust policies that secure access both at an organisation's perimeter and within its hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure. The collaboration aligns with the Zero Trust Architecture recommendations by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which emphasise three primary enforcement points: identity, network access, and workload segmentation. Consequently, Illumio ZTS and Netskope ZTNA ensure consistent Zero Trust security by sharing context to reduce cyberattack risks.

Several key benefits are touted by this integration:

• Full Visibility Across Hybrid Environments: By combining Illumio ZTS's application-to-application and risk-based visibility with Netskope ZTNA Next's user-to-application-based visibility, organisations gain a consistent, real-time view of traffic. This integration enables a better understanding of risk end-to-end.
• Protection for End Users from Non-Compliant Workloads: The combined visibility between the platforms allows security teams to define policies that block access between users and potentially compromised workloads. This measure increases overall resilience within the organisation.
• Dynamic ZTNA Policy: Netskope's security policies are automatically updated based on metadata from Illumio, eliminating the need for manual rule changes as workload attributes evolve. This ensures continuous protection for users and critical applications, facilitating the implementation of scalable Zero Trust architecture.

In the context of rising ransomware attacks and escalating data breach costs, Zero Trust solutions are increasingly favoured by organisations aiming to boost their cyber resilience. According to IBM data, the cost of breaches has grown to USD $4.45 million. In this landscape, ZTNA is widely adopted. Gartner projects that the use of micro-segmentation in Zero Trust architecture will increase significantly, with 60% of enterprises expected to deploy more than one form of micro-segmentation by 2026.

David Willis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at Netskope, stated, "Businesses today are under pressure to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right online resources, and that requires applying zero-trust principles to every interaction with those resources. Our partnership with Illumio ensures that the Netskope One platform learns additional, needed context around private workload posture to help inform and reinforce the security with which private applications and workloads are accessed."

Echoing the sentiment, Mario Espinoza, Chief Product Officer at Illumio, expressed, "Organisations need their Zero Trust technologies to share context so that they have the same view of the environment they're protecting and can update policies accordingly. That's exactly what the Illumio and Netskope integration does – Illumio provides Netskope with the needed context to prevent remote users from accessing compromised workloads, while also protecting potentially non-compliant internal workloads from remote access, stopping breaches from spreading. Essentially, we are making it easier than ever for organisations to implement Zero Trust across their hybrid environments to strengthen resilience."

Customers of Illumio and Netskope can deploy the plugin today via the Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) platform.