Why Network Visibility Is the Best Place to Start When It Comes to Zero Trust

“Gaining complete visibility into the network is like lighting up the whole street. When it comes to implementing Zero Trust, this is the best place to start.” John Kindervag, Zero Trust and Importance of Network Visibility.

All the major Zero Trust models identify network visibility as being essential to power your security tools with the data they need to safeguard the network and accelerate your progress toward Zero Trust. For many Zero Trust leaders, the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline is the chosen solution they use to provide complete visibility into all network traffic, whether from on-premises, private, virtual, container, or public cloud environments.. The Gigamon solution meets the requirements of the network pillar of the Zero Trust model and of the data and application pillars. In essence, the visibility Gigamon provides lights up the whole street leaving no place for threat actors to hide.

This level of visibility has been critical to the success of many high-profile Zero Trust projects. For example, in 2019, the National Security Agency, Defense Information Systems Agency, and U.S. Cyber Command began a multi-phase Zero Trust reference architecture project. The objectives of the project is to establish stronger defenses against unauthorized lateral movement; protect against privilege escalation, and to eliminate blind spots across the entire network, including on-premises and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

During the initial planning and design process, the project team determined that a scalable, centralized visibility approach was a key requirement for the reference architecture. The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline provided a centralized approach for network traffic collection and routing, giving the tools responsible for enforcing Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) policies the visibility they needed to be effective.

“At first the implementation did not include Gigamon visibility solutions, but midway through the team determined that the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline is critical to tie everything together and provide crucial visibility into the physical, virtualized, and cloud environments.” David Jones, US Department of Defense.

The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline delivers specific and unique benefits that are critical to providing the visibility necessary for successful Zero Trust implementations, including:

• Eliminating Blind Spots – Gigamon provides complete deep observability into North-South, East-West, virtual machine, container, encrypted, as well as IoT/OT or BYOD-generated traffic.
• Detecting Lateral Movement and Threats – endpoint security is regularly compromised and, when this happens, security falls back onto the network. Gigamon can observe and correlate network behavior identifying security risks and threats. 
• Optimize Security Tools – Gigamon reduces unnecessary network data sent to SIEM, NDR, and other security tools by 50 to 60 percent, enabling these tools to detect threats more quickly and precisely.

Want to know more?

Meritalk is co-hosting the Visualyze Zero Trust Summit with Gigamon in Washington D.C. on Thursday, February 29, 2024 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. EST. At this event, you will hear speakers from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Defense as well as speakers from leading technology vendors and integrators discuss the key issues of mitigating and reducing Zero Trust project risk in complex environments.

Attendees are eligible for CPE credits.

If you are unable to attend the event, you can still learn how Gigamon is enabling government and commercial organizations to meet their Zero Trust goals. Please visit the Gigamon Zero Trust information hub.