Why Illumio Wants You to Break Up With Your Firewall

Enterprises’ relationships with firewalls remains complicated. And most — 86% — still use firewalls to segment their applications and reduce the risk of data breaches, according to an Illumio report. Enterprises’ relationships with firewalls remains complicated. And most — 86% — still use firewalls to segment their applications and reduce the risk of data breaches, according to an Illumio report. For this report, Virtual Intelligence Briefing surveyed 300 IT professionals and found only 19% of companies use host-based segmentation to secure their applications. About 25% say they are actively planning a project to do so, while more than half are not using segmentation at all or planning to in the next six months. “I in no way think people should get rid of their perimeter firewalls — that would be bad for the world,” said Matt Glenn, VP of product management at Illumio. But using firewalls for perimeter security is different than using firewalls to segment internal, east-west traffic. This, he adds, is where the relationship becomes dysfunctional. “Organizations are stuck in a bad relationship and they don’t know how to break up,” Glenn said. “Instead of rethinking the relationship they are in with the firewall, they just don’t do anything.” Illumio does, however, as a segementation security vendor, have a vested interested in wanting companies to break up with their firewalls and deploy segmentation. But this is the way that the industry is headed, and by now vendors and analysts agree that segmentation is a foundational piece of organizations’ security strategy. “Defending the perimeter is no longer an effective strategy,” Forrester Research says. “Zero Trust implements methods to localize and isolate threats through microcore, microsegmentation, and deep visibility to give you an organized approach to identify threats and limit the impact of any breach.” Segmentation, or microsegmenation, enables organizations to assign fine-grained security policies to their applications. The approach improves network security by integrating it directly into a virtualized workload without requiring a hardware-based firewall. It reduces a company’s attack surface by essentially sealing off workloads from the rest of the network, thus preventing hackers from gaining access to the wider system. Most companies surveyed said it’s difficult and expensive to manage their firewalls. Some 66% said it’s fairly to extremely challenging. And once they do deploy firewalls, 66% said it’s challenging to fund operating expenditure budgets and maintain their firewalls. The report also found 71% of organizations operate in hybrid environments, meaning they use both on-premises data centers and public clouds. “Why do organizations adopt public cloud? So they can go faster,” Glenn said. Meanwhile, a single firewall update to accommodate a new application or application behavior changes takes organizations between one and two weeks, on average, the report found. “If they are waiting two weeks, isn’t that the exact opposite [of going faster]? So if you’re stuck in this bad relationship, you’re trying to do triple lutzes to make those firewalls work for you,” Glenn said. “It’s very difficult.”