Zero-trust segmentation (ZTS) company Illumio and secure access service edge (SASE) provider Netskope announced a strategic partnership to integrate their ZTS and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) products to help joint customers enhance user and application visibility and create consistent zero-trust policies for their hybrid cloud environments.

This alliance aims to deliver a more comprehensive zero-trust security framework by integrating Illumio's ZTS with Netskope's ZTNA Next through the Netskope Cloud Exchange platform, without additional cost to joint customers.

“Zero trust is not provided by just one vendor,” Andy Horwitz, VP of business development and tech alliances at Netskope, told SDxCentral. “What Netskope and Illumio do really well together is, we provide that in a very simple way, that Netskope covers north-south traffic Illumio covers east-to-west, and therefore you got zero trust covered.”

He highlighted the customer-driven nature of this partnership. “We had a few large customers asking us to work together which is always the best way [of how] it starts.”

Todd Palmer, senior VP of global partner sales and alliances at Illumio, emphasized the sophistication of modern cyber threats and the need for advanced integration between technologies. “Hackers have gotten unbelievably sophisticated and customers do want best-of-breed technologies out there in the marketplace and having an integration, so you can automate certain things that happened between technologies is a huge advantage to customers so they can have best of breed but they also have the ability to automate certain things in their environment and provide context between applications.”

As ZTNA is part of the SASE and security services edge (SSE) stack, Horwitz expected the partnership between Netskope and Illumio to further broaden in the future.

The benefits of combining ZTS and ZTNA

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) prescribed three primary enforcement points in its Zero Trust Architecture recommendations: identity, network access and workload segmentation. In this framework, ZTNA is implemented at the organization’s boundary, while ZTS is applied to the destination workloads.

That’s why the Illumio and Netskope partnership integrates ZTS with ZTNA aiming to bring several benefits, including enhanced visibility for both north-south and east-west traffic.

The partnership combines application-to-application and risk-based visibility from Illumio ZTS with user-to-application-based visibility in Netskope ZTNA Next. “Illumio brings the context and visibility of how and Netskope gives the context and visibility of who and those two things together are valuable. So who was trying to access certain applications and how specifically are they accessing is the context that we provide in customers,” Palmer explained.

For example, as workloads move from development to production, the integration ensures that security policies are automatically updated to reflect the workload changes, preventing unauthorized access. “By sharing that telemetry, that labeling when a workload changes in terms of what it is, Illumio shares information back to Netskope so we can change who has access, and that's really powerful. And that's done automatically,” Horwitz said. “DevOps does not want to slow down.”

Horwitz highlighted the importance of automation in this process. “The amount of cloud workloads is exploding, it's been exploding and it's only going to get more and so those applications going up and down and changing and moving from [development to production] and that happens more and more dynamically. And so you still need to control that access.”

Another benefit of the combination is to facilitate cooperation between network and security teams, “as you have to bring those organizations together to implement these [zero trust] solutions throughout an organization,” Palmer said.

Illumio and Netskope partnership aligns with industry trends

Recent research showed that zero-trust architecture implementation is gaining more traction and maturity.

According to Gartner, ZTNA is seeing strong adoption among large and midmarket organizations and the firm forecasts 10% of large enterprises will have a mature and measurable zero-trust program by 2026.

“VPNs had been around a long time. So the replacement of VPN and frankly, because of there's been some security breaches and vulnerabilities in the news, that has accelerated people asking more questions,” Horwitz said.

“What zero trust network access does simply is replace the VPN,” he added. “It really creates that direct connection from a user to a specific application, doesn't touch the internet, and it makes it much more secure.”

On the other hand, microsegmentation adoption is also expected to rise rapidly. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of enterprises working towards zero-trust architecture will use more than one form of microsegmentation, up from less than 5 percent in 2023.

“The microsegmentation market that we play in is relatively new,” Palmer said. “So huge growth opportunity and huge advantage the customers have as they're looking to implement the protection of the east-to-west traffic.”