Upgrading the security levels of your data center is made effortless by HPE Aruba Networking. This article provides more insight on how implementing Zero Trust models increase the security measures on important workloads in your data center.
As the cybersecurity threat landscape undergoes significant changes, malicious attackers are motivated more than ever to breach into enterprise data centers seeking valuable data. To counteract, the adoption of a Zero Trust model is deemed the leading trend in modern enterprise security practices.
In context of a data center, adopting a Zero Trust model implies the approach of distrusting every entity on the network by default, and to only deem traffic trustworthy if a security policy explicitly enables it.
Fall short of the traditional perimeter security methods, the modern Zero Trust Security approach views trust as a potential vulnerability. It assumes that no user, regardless of their access to the network, should be trusted by default owing to the possibility of their compromise. Validation of both identity and device is imperative throughout the network. Every constituent of the network must independently prove its trustworthiness and get authenticated by any other component it interacts with, which includes existing point security measures.
Many Zero Trust Security solutions predominantly focus on network edges or access points. However, for organizations, it’s imperative to incorporate Zero Trust mindset and architectural layout to the data center. This is crucial as most of the organization’s essential physical and virtualized business-related applications and workloads are situated within the data center.
Microsegmentation in data centers
Microsegmentation plays an integral role in Zero Trust. The practice of segmentation and isolation is pivotal in avoiding unwanted lateral progression. This is achieved by scrutinizing all inbound and outbound traffic in the data center and implementing policies that deter ill-intentioned entities from transitioning through an enterprise or data center network. To understand the concept better, consider this – just like modern naval vessels are engineered with compartmentalized steel hulls to minimize the damage from an attack, contemporary data centers should utilize the design segmentation approach to limit the extent of a security breach.
Microsegmentation offers specific security controls to workloads or applications in a data center, crucial for the modern cloud environment. It supports multiple applications running on a single server, VM or container. With microsegmentation, organizations can apply security protocols to each workload and application, instead of having a single, overarching security policy for all VMs and servers.
In the past, solutions for achieving microsegmentation in data centers were limited and often not optimal. These traditional methods included stateless ACL-based switches, hardware firewall devices, virtualized firewall devices, and software that uses agent-based firewalls.
Traditional Data Center Segmentation Solutions
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There are indeed segmentation solutions available, but they usually come with shortcomings including inadequate security, complicated design and management, high capital and operational expenditures, and underwhelming scalability and performance when it comes to security.
About the HPE Aruba Networking distributed services switch
Coming as a breakthrough to conquer these traditional restrictions, the HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 switch series, equipped with AMD Pensando, introduces a novel class of switching solutions. This pioneering switch enables the DPU and provides up to 800G of distributed stateful firewall for intra-traffic. It also offers Zero Trust segmentation, IPsec VPN encryption, NAT, and far-reaching telemetry services. All these features are provided inline, across every port, bringing them closer to critical enterprise applications.
The comparison: Traditional firewall appliance and HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 design
HPE Aruba Networking
The CX 10000 delivers a unique blend of performance, scale, and automation for distributing advanced networking and security services where it’s impractical and costly to force traffic back and forth across the network to a centralized policy enforcement point and instead simply apply these services at the services network access layer edge where the applications are running.
Securing your data center with HPE Aruba Networking
The HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 with AMD Pensando provides an entirely new class of switching solutions to overcome the limitations of legacy architectures. Our HPE Aruba Networking distributed services architecture expands Zero Trust deeper into the data center, to the network-server edge, delivering fine-grained microsegmentation, dramatically scaling, and strengthening the security of mission-critical workloads—delivering greater scale and performance at lower TCO than traditional solutions.
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