Mumbai – 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:

1   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.

2   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.

3   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, organisations 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 Netskope VP of Technology Alliances David Willis.

“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 Illumio chief product officer Mario Espinoza. “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.”