Illumio teamed up with CrowdStrike and extended its microsegmentation technology to endpoints.

Until now, Illumio focused on data center security. Its microsegmentation technology helps enable zero-trust networks by enabling fine-grained security policies to be assigned to applications. It reduces a company’s attack surface by essentially sealing off applications from the rest of the network, thus preventing hackers from gaining access to the wider system.

The new product, Illumio Edge, is managed in the cloud and uses a lightweight agent on endpoints — either an Illumio agent or customers can use an existing CrowdStrike Falcon agent.

Customers wanted to use Illumio to help create zero-trust endpoints, said Matt Glenn, VP of product management at Illumio. And they also asked for an integration with endpoint security firm CrowdStrike. “So if you are a CrowdStrike customer, you don’t need to deploy another agent,” he said.

“Illumio’s got segmentation, CrowdStrike knows EDR [endpoint detection and response], and these two solutions fit nicely together,” he added. “Because when you think about EDR you’re really thinking about your laptop or what’s happening inside of the box. At Illumio, we think about how your box relates to the outside world — that’s really the business of segmentation. So when you put these two things together it’s a very natural sort of complimentary process products.”

About a dozen customers have been using Illumio Edge in preview since last August, Glenn said. The new endpoint product develops a workflow to create automated, risk-free allow lists for detected services. With policy in place, enforcement follows the laptop on and off the network.

And while it’s been in use for almost a year, Illumio has seen demand for the endpoint product increase during the pandemic, Glenn said. One customer the deployed Illumio Edge on its employees’ laptops discovered that one of the employees’ kids laptops was trying to spread ransomware onto the employee’s laptop. “When employees are working from home, they’re inheriting risk from their kids,” Glenn said. “With working from home, the risk matrix changes. So whatever your employees’ kids and spouses are doing, you’re inheriting that risk.”