Illumio and Netskope Announce Zero Trust Partnership to Strengthen Enterprise Resilience Against Cyberattacks

Zero Trust Segmentation combined with Zero Trust Network Access delivers dynamic protection across modern hybrid IT


SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Illumio, Inc., the Zero Trust Segmentation company, and Netskope, a leader in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today announced a Zero Trust partnership that brings together the power of Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to protect against breaches and build cyber resilience. The new partnership combines Illumio ZTS with Netskope ZTNA Next via the Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) platform to enable network and security teams to create Zero Trust policies that consistently secure access at an organization's perimeter and within its hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure.

In its recommended Zero Trust Architecture, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), prescribes three primary Zero Trust enforcement points: identity, network access, and workload segmentation, with Zero Trust Network Access implemented at the organization’s boundary, and Zero Trust Segmentation implemented at the destination workloads. Together, Illumio ZTS and Netskope ZTNA Next share context to ensure consistent Zero Trust security at the perimeter and within an organization’s network to reduce the risk from cyberattacks. Key benefits include:

  • Full visibility across hybrid environments: By combining application-to-application and risk-based visibility from Illumio ZTS with the user-to-application-based visibility in Netskope ZTNA Next, organizations gain a consistent, real-time view of user-to-application and application-to-application traffic, enabling them to better understand risk end-to-end.

  • Protection for end users from non-compliant workloads: Combined visibility between platforms enables security teams to define Netskope policy to block access between users and potentially compromised workloads, or workloads in segmented environments, increasing resilience across the organization.

  • Dynamic ZTNA policy: Netskope’s security policies are automatically updated based on metadata from Illumio, eliminating the need to rewrite rules as workload attributes change, ensuring users and critical applications are always protected and allowing organizations to scale their Zero Trust architecture.

With ransomware attacks on the rise and IBM data showing the cost of breaches increasing to $4.45 million, organizations are turning towards Zero Trust solutions to strengthen resilience. ZTNA is already widely adopted with Gartner seeing “strong adoption among large organizations and midmarket organizations.” Adoption of microsegmentation is also expected to rise rapidly; Gartner predicts that “by 2026, 60 percent of enterprises working toward Zero Trust architecture will use more than one deployment form of microsegmentation, up from less than 5% in 2023.”

“Businesses today are under pressure to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right online resources, and that requires applying zero trust principles to every interaction with those resources. Our partnership with Illumio ensures that the Netskope One platform learns additional, needed context around private workload posture to help inform and reinforce the security with which private applications and workloads are accessed,” said David Willis, Vice-President of Technology Alliances at Netskope.

“Organizations need their Zero Trust technologies to share context so that they have the same view of the environment they’re protecting and can update policies accordingly,” said Mario Espinoza, Chief Product Officer at Illumio. “That’s exactly what the Illumio and Netskope integration does – Illumio provides Netskope with the needed context to prevent remote users from accessing compromised workloads, while also protecting potentially non-compliant internal workloads from remote access, stopping breaches from spreading. Essentially, we are making it easier than ever for organizations to implement Zero Trust across their hybrid environments to strengthen resilience.”

Illumio and Netskope customers can deploy the plugin today via the Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) platform. Find more information at: https://www.illumio.com/partners-tap/netskope.

Notes to editors
Gartner®, Market Guide for Microsegmentation, By Adam Hils, Rajpreet Kaur, Jeremy D'Hoinne, 12 June 2023
Gartner®, Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access, By Aaron McQuaid, Neil MacDonald, John Watts, Rajpreet Kaur, 14 August 2023
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About Illumio 
Illumio, the Zero Trust Segmentation Company, stops breaches and ransomware from spreading across the hybrid attack surface. The Illumio ZTS Platform visualizes all traffic flows between workloads, devices, and the internet, automatically sets granular segmentation policies to control communications, and isolates high-value assets and compromised systems proactively or in response to active attacks. Illumio protects organizations of all sizes, from Fortune 100 to small businesses, by stopping breaches and ransomware in minutes, saving millions of dollars in application downtime, and accelerating cloud and digital transformation projects.

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