Closing the Cloud Visibility Gap: How to Secure East-West Data Movement Between VPCs

Most security teams have spent years building defenses at the network perimeter. Firewalls, web application gateways, and intrusion prevention systems all focus on traffic moving in and out of the environment — what’s commonly called North-South traffic. But inside the network, where workloads communicate laterally across virtual private clouds (VPCs), visibility often drops to near zero.

That gap is exactly where attackers operate, moving undetected between workloads until they reach high-value targets. Understanding how to secure East-West traffic in the cloud is now a foundational requirement for any organization running production workloads in distributed environments.

What Is East-West Traffic Security?

Why East-West Traffic Is a Growing Security Blind Spot

The Challenges of Securing East-West Traffic Between VPCs

How to Secure East-West Traffic in the Cloud

Key Capabilities Required for Effective East-West Traffic Security

Architectural Approaches to Secure East-West Traffic

Best Practices for Securing East-West Traffic Across VPCs

Closing the Cloud Visibility Gap with Deep Observability

How Gigamon Enables Secure East-West Traffic

Turning Visibility Into Security Advantage

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaways

East-West traffic security focuses on monitoring and inspecting lateral data movement between workloads, containers, and VPCs rather than just defending the perimeter.

Native cloud tools rarely provide the deep packet-level visibility needed to detect threats moving laterally across VPC boundaries.

Deep observability — combining full-fidelity packet data with metadata — closes the visibility gap and enables faster, more accurate threat detection.

A layered approach that includes segmentation, zero trust principles, and intelligent traffic inspection gives security teams the control they need over internal cloud traffic.

What Is East-West Traffic Security?

East-West traffic refers to lateral communication between workloads, services, containers, and VPCs within a cloud environment. Any time one microservice calls another, or a database responds to an application server in a different VPC, that data moves East-West. It stays inside the environment and never crosses the perimeter.

So what is East-West traffic security? It’s the practice of monitoring, inspecting, and controlling internal lateral traffic to identify threats, enforce policies, and prevent unauthorized movement between workloads.

Traditional perimeter security (North-South defenses) assumes that traffic inside the network is inherently trustworthy. East-West traffic security does not operate on that same assumption. Instead, it treats internal traffic with the same scrutiny applied to external connections, because once an attacker gets past the perimeter, lateral movement is how they escalate access, exfiltrate data, and cause damage.

Why East-West Traffic Is a Growing Security Blind Spot

Cloud environments have changed dramatically in the last few years. Organizations are running thousands of microservices, spinning up containers that live for seconds, and spreading workloads across multiple VPCs and cloud providers. Each of these shifts generates more East-West traffic, and the volume is significantly outpacing North-South traffic.

The problem is that native cloud tools were not built to provide deep packet visibility across VPC boundaries. Cloud provider flow logs capture metadata, but they don’t show you what’s inside the packets. Security teams are working with incomplete information when they try to detect threats or investigate incidents.

The real-world risks here are serious and well-documented. Here are some of the most common threats that exploit limited East-West visibility:

Lateral movement: Once an attacker compromises a single workload, they move laterally to reach databases, identity systems, or other high-value targets without crossing the perimeter.

Ransomware propagation: Ransomware spreads between connected workloads and VPCs, and without East-West monitoring, teams often don’t detect it until encryption is already underway.

Insider threats: Malicious or compromised insiders operating within the environment generate traffic that perimeter tools will never flag.

The Challenges of Securing East-West Traffic Between VPCs

Even teams that recognize the importance of East-West traffic security face major hurdles when trying to implement it. Here are the most common challenges:

Encryption and ephemeral workloads: Much of the traffic between VPCs is encrypted, and containers spin up and down too quickly for static monitoring approaches to keep pace.

Multi-cloud and hybrid complexity: Organizations running workloads across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises data centers deal with fragmented visibility and inconsistent tooling across each environment.

Performance and cost trade-offs: Inspecting high volumes of internal traffic can introduce latency and drive up cloud compute costs, forcing teams into difficult decisions about what to monitor and what to ignore.

These challenges compound as cloud environments scale, which is why a purpose-built approach to East-West visibility is so important.

How to Secure East-West Traffic in the Cloud

The starting point for securing East-West traffic is deep observability. This means gaining packet-level visibility into lateral traffic, not relying solely on logs and metrics. Logs tell you that something happened, whereas packets tell you exactly what happened, how, and with what data.

Beyond visibility, segmentation strategies play a critical role. VPC segmentation limits the blast radius when a workload is compromised, and Zero Trust architecture enforces strict access controls so that no internal connection is automatically trusted.

Traffic inspection models also matter. Inline inspection allows tools to block threats in real time, while out-of-band inspection enables monitoring and analysis without introducing latency into production traffic flows. The right approach often combines both, depending on the workload and risk profile.

Key Capabilities Required for Effective East-West Traffic Security

Not all visibility tools are created equal. To secure East-West traffic between VPCs at scale, organizations need a specific set of capabilities. Here’s what matters most:

Network visibility : Full-fidelity traffic mirroring across VPCs without packet loss, giving security tools access to complete, unaltered data.

Threat detection: Integration with NDR, IDS/IPS, and AI-driven analytics tools that can identify anomalies and known attack patterns within lateral traffic.

Scalability: The ability to handle elastic cloud workloads and dynamic traffic patterns without degrading performance or requiring constant manual reconfiguration.

Architectural Approaches to Secure East-West Traffic

When designing East-West traffic security, teams typically choose between centralized and distributed inspection architectures.

A centralized model routes traffic to a shared inspection point, which simplifies management but can create bottlenecks at scale. A distributed model places inspection closer to individual workloads or VPCs, reducing latency but adding architectural complexity.

Traffic aggregation and intelligent load balancing help bridge the gap between these approaches. By collecting traffic from multiple sources, filtering out irrelevant data, and distributing only the relevant packets to security tools, organizations reduce inspection overhead while maintaining comprehensive coverage.

Decoupling visibility from enforcement is another important design principle. When the observability layer operates independently from the tools that enforce policy, teams gain the flexibility to add, swap, or scale security tools without redesigning the underlying traffic architecture.

Best Practices for Securing East-West Traffic Across VPCs

Securing internal cloud traffic requires a disciplined, ongoing approach. Here are the practices that consistently produce the strongest results:

Apply zero trust principles to internal traffic: Never assume that traffic between VPCs or workloads is safe. Verify identity, enforce least-privilege access, and treat every internal connection as a potential attack vector.

Maintain visibility through encryption: Encrypt traffic in transit but ensure your observability platform can decrypt where necessary so that security tools still have access to packet-level data for inspection.

Monitor traffic patterns continuously: Use behavioral analytics to establish baselines and detect anomalies. Sudden spikes in lateral traffic or unexpected connections between workloads are often early indicators of compromise.

Closing the Cloud Visibility Gap With Deep Observability

Deep observability goes beyond traditional monitoring by combining packet data with metadata to create a complete picture of what’s happening inside the network. This approach gives security teams actionable intelligence — not just alerts, but the context they need to understand the scope and impact of a threat.

When metadata and packet data are correlated, teams can identify threats faster, investigate incidents more efficiently, and respond before attackers achieve their objectives. The difference between catching lateral movement in minutes versus hours often comes down to whether the security team has cloud visibility at the packet level.

Improved visibility also reduces false positives. When tools can inspect actual traffic content instead of relying on incomplete logs, they generate fewer unnecessary alerts and free up analysts to focus on genuine threats.

How Gigamon Enables Secure East-West Traffic

Gigamon provides visibility across VPCs and cloud environments through the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, which captures, aggregates, and distributes traffic to security and monitoring tools. Rather than forcing teams to rely on incomplete native cloud telemetry, Gigamon delivers full-fidelity packet data from across the hybrid cloud.

Traffic aggregation, filtering, and intelligent distribution ensure that security tools receive only the data they need. This reduces tool overload, improves detection accuracy, and lowers compute costs associated with inspecting high volumes of East-West traffic.

Gigamon AI capabilities further enhance threat detection by applying advanced analytics to network telemetry, helping teams identify suspicious patterns within lateral traffic. Combined with a strong cloud security posture, this level of observability turns East-West traffic from a blind spot into a source of security intelligence.

Organizations interested in seeing these capabilities in action can request a live demo.

Turning Visibility Into Security Advantage

As cloud environments scale, the volume of East-West traffic will only increase, and so will the risks of leaving it unmonitored. Organizations that close the visibility gap now will be better positioned to detect threats early, contain incidents faster, and reduce the overall cost of security operations.

Securing East-West traffic is no longer optional. It’s the foundation of a modern cloud security strategy. By combining deep observability, zero trust principles, and purpose-built traffic inspection, security teams can turn internal visibility from a weakness into a strength.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is East-West traffic in the cloud?

East-West traffic refers to lateral data movement between workloads, containers, services, and VPCs within a cloud environment. Unlike North-South traffic, which crosses the network perimeter, East-West traffic stays internal and typically represents the majority of total traffic volume in modern cloud architectures.

Why is East-West traffic security important?

Attackers who bypass perimeter defenses rely on lateral movement to access sensitive systems and data. Without East-West traffic security, organizations have no way to detect or stop this internal movement, leaving them vulnerable to ransomware, data exfiltration, and prolonged breaches.

How do you secure East-West traffic between VPCs?

Effective East-West traffic security requires deep observability at the packet level, network segmentation to limit lateral movement, zero trust policies that verify every internal connection, and integration with threat detection tools like NDR and IDS/IPS. A deep observability pipeline that aggregates and distributes traffic to security tools is the most efficient way to achieve this at scale.

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