Beyond SDN: Micro-Segmentation, Macro-Segmentation or Application-Segmentation Part-2

Large publicly traded companies like Cisco, EMC (VMWare) and Arista Networks are deeply entrenched with their customers giving them a beachhead on which they can fairly easily launch new products. Since their brands, and value is well understood and established it’s often a matter of just showing up with a product that is good enough to win new business. By contrast, start-ups like Illumio and Tufin have to struggle to gain brand recognition and work exceptionally hard to secure each and every proof of concept (PoC) engagement. For a PoC to be considered successful these new startups have to demonstrate significant value to the entrenched players as they also need to overcome the institutional inertia behind every buying decision.  So how are Illumio or Tufin any different, and what value could they possibly deliver to justify even considering them? While both Illumio and Tufin are focused on making enterprises and the deployment of enterprise applications more secure, they each leverage a dramatically different approach. First, we’ll explore Tufin, then Illumio.

Tufin has a feature called the Interactive Topology Map, which enables them to traverse your entire physical network, including your use of hybrid clouds to craft a complete map of your infrastructure. This enables them to quickly display on a single pane of glass how everything in your enterprise is connected. They then offer visual path analysis from which you can explore your security and firewall policies across your network. Furthermore, you can use a sophisticated discovery mechanism by which you select two systems, and it explores the path between them and displays all the security policies that might impact data flows between these two systems. In actual practice, as you define an application within Tufin you can leverage this sophisticated discovery or manually define the source, destination, and service. Tufin will then show you the status of the connection, at which point you can drill down to see what if any components in your infrastructure require a change request. They then have a six-step change ticket workflow: Request, Business Approval, Risk Identification, Risk Review, Technical Design, and Auto Verification. To date they appear to support the following vendors: Cisco, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Juniper, F5, Intel Security, VMWare NSX, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack.

By contrast, Illumio takes a much different approach, it designs security from the inside out with no dependencies on infrastructure. They attach an agent to each enterprise application as it is launched. This attached agent then watches over every network flow into and out of the application and records exactly what the application requires to be effective. From this, it computes a security policy for that application that can then be enforced every time that application is launched. It can then adapt to workflow changes, and it also has the capability to encrypt all data flowing between systems. While their videos and data sheets don’t specifically say this it sounds as though they’ve placed a shim into the network OS stack hosting the application so that they can then record all the network traffic flow characteristics, that’s likely how they support on the fly encryption between nodes. They do call out that they use IPTables, so it is possible that their code is an extension of this pre-existing security platform. Clearly, though they are just above the adapter, and Jimmy Ray confirms this in one of his awesome videos that Illumio is based on an “adapter security platform” view. Illumio then provides an enterprise management application to gather the flow data from all these agents to craft, and manage its view of the network.

So while Tufin looks into your network from the outside and enumerates what it finds, Illumio looks from the application out. Both are impressive and yield interesting perspectives worthy of evaluating. Moving forward both are tuned to delivery Application-Segmentation, it will be interesting to see how the market evaluates each, both had strong presences at RSA2016, but it will ultimately be revenue from customers that determines success.