Network segmentation is an effective strategy for protecting access to key data assets, and impeding the lateral movement of threats and cyber criminals inside your data center. With network virtualization, such as VMware NSX and Cisco ACI now a reality it's far simpler to set up granular security policies for east-west traffic within the data center. Yet the added granularity of securities policies creates significant complexity.
Presented by renowned industry expert Professor Avishai Wool, this technical webinar will provide strategies and best practices to help organizations migrate and manage security policies efficiently within a micro-segmented data center.
In this webinar, Prof. Wool will discuss how to:
•Identify and securely migrate legacy applications to a micro-segmented data center
•Effectively define and enforce security policies for East-West traffic
•Manage the micro-segmented data center alongside traditional on-premise security devices
•Identify risk and manage compliance in a micro-segmented data center
•Use network segmentation to reduce the scope of regulatory audits
•Identify and avoid common network segmentation mistakes
2. TOPICS COVERED
Defining and enforce security policies for East-West traffic
Managing micro-segmented data center alongside traditional devices
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Migrating applications to a micro-segmented data center
Identify risk and manage compliance04
Q&A and Summary05
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4. LEGACY DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE
Users Servers
Outside World,
Business partners,
Perimeter
Firewall
East-West traffic North-South traffic
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5. WHY THIS IS RISKY
• No filtering capabilities controlling east-west traffic
• Allows unrestricted traffic:
• Between internal users’ desktops/laptops and servers
• Between servers in different segments
• Once attackers gain a foothold – free lateral movement
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6. SEGMENTED DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE
Users
Zone
Server
Zone 2 Outside World,
Business partners,
Perimeter
FirewallServer
Zone 1
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7. SEGMENTED = MORE SECURE
• Introduce filtering choke-points between zones
• Allows control of east-west traffic
• Lets organizations restrict lateral movement between zones
• How can we make this a reality?
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8. Which Platform Do You Use To Manage Your
Private Cloud / Virtualized Data Center?
• Vmware NSX
• Cisco ACI
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Other
• We Don't Have A Virtualized Data Center
POLL
Please vote using the “votes from audience” tab in your BrightTALK panel
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10. CHALLENGE #1: INTRODUCING CHOKE POINTS
• In the traditional data center: a major effort
• Hardware, cabling, reconfigure switching and routing
• In a virtualized, software-defined, data center:
• Built-in firewalls as part of the infrastructure
• No extra hardware needed
• Software-Defined Networking ✓
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11. CHALLENGE #2: ZONING
• How many zones to define?
• Which subnets should reside in each zone?
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12. A ZONING TRADE-OFF
• Traffic inside each zone remains unrestricted
• For better security, define many small zones
• “Micro-segmentation”
• But: need policy (rules) between every pair of zones
• “Allow service X from zone 1 to zone 2”
• N zones ==> N*N traffic directions
• For better manageability, define a few large zones
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13. CHALLENGE #3: FILTERING POLICY BETWEEN ZONES
• Traffic inside each zone is unfiltered: allowed
• … traffic between zones must be explicitly allowed by policy
• Goal: write policy to allow legitimate zone-crossing traffic
• Challenge: discover and characterize this traffic
• Did you know: VMware NSX’s default policy is “allow all”
• Works around the challenge
• … But is completely insecure
✓
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15. THE BUSINESS-APPLICATION PERSPECTIVE
• East-West traffic is generated by business applications
• Each business application has:
• Servers supporting it
• Clients accessing it
• Business application connectivity requirements:
• Server-to-server traffic flows
• Client-to-server traffic flows
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16. SEGMENTATION FOR BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
• Human-accessible systems: in a separate zone from servers:
• Desktops / Laptops / Smartphones
• Servers belonging to an application, that communicate with
each other:
• in same zone
• Infrastructure servers, that support multiple applications:
• in a dedicated zone
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17. PLANNING NETWORK SEGMENTATION: BLUEPRINT
• Discover business applications’ connectivity requirements
• Select number of zones, and their characterization
• Based on applications’ flows, assign subnets to zones
• Write filtering policy (rules) allowing zone-crossing flows
• Avoid breaking business applications’ connectivity
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19. IS YOUR ORGANIZATION WELL-DISCIPLINED?
If:
• All applications are documented
• Applications’ connectivity requirements are documented
• Documentation is machine readable
Then “discovery” is easy!
• What if documentation is missing / outdated ?
✓
✓
✓
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39. MAINTENANCE OF THE SEGMENTATION
• Zoning remains stable over time
• … but application connectivity requirements evolve
• … so filtering policies need to change over time
• Need application-aware and segmentation-aware change
management processes
• Need visibility that filtering policies comply with zoning
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44. NORTH-SOUTH TRAFFIC
• Hybrid network:
• Software-defined data center
• traditional networking outside data center
• Application connectivity is also north-south
• Goal: Single change workflow for all filtering technologies
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45. • Identical for North-South and East-West
• Indifferent to network technology
• Abstracts away filtering device details
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49. • AlgoSec Standard risks +
• User-defined risks +
• Connectivity spreadsheet violations
• What-if risk check, before changes
are implemented
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50. What are your plans for filtering east-west traffic?
• Already implemented
• Planning to implement over the next 6 months
• Planning to implement over the next 6-12
months
• No plans
POLL
Please vote using the “votes from audience” tab in your BrightTALK panel
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51. SUMMARY
Plan
• Discover business applications’ connectivity requirements
• Design zoning, write policy for zone-crossing flows
• Document in connectivity matrix
Maintain
• Visibility, automated comparison to connectivity matrix
• Segmentation-aware change process
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