Across industries, network segmentation is quickly becoming a critical capability for enterprises of all sizes. Why? First, network segmentation prevents the lateral spread of threats inside the network. Second, it separates dev, test, and production environments. And lastly, it meets increasingly complex compliance requirements while enabling a Zero Trust security strategy.
However, historically network segmentation has been fraught with operational challenges and limited by platform capabilities, leading to the perception that setting up and configuring segmentation policies requires massive changes to the physical network as well as a complex, bloated, and costly deployment of physical firewall appliances.
Not anymore. VMware takes a distributed, software-based approach to segmentation, eliminating the need to redesign your network in order to deploy security. Instead, segmentation policies are applied at the workload level through NSX Firewall, which is deployed on top of your existing VSphere 7 environments. This allows you to easily create zones in the data center where you can separate traffic by application or environment — providing the quickest and easiest way to achieve your data center segmentation goals.
The surprising part? You can do this in four easy steps in just a few minutes — and without changing any of the underlying physical network configurations. This is all you need to do:
- Deploy NSX Manager and add vCenter as a compute manager.
- Provision security components on the hosts in the hypervisor cluster.
- Use a simple wizard to create VLAN–backed network segments and attach the workloads (requires no changes to the existing network configuration).
- Add environment tags to your workloads in NSX Manager(Env = Prod or Test or Non-Prod, for example).
Hard to believe? Don’t take my word for it — watch this 10-minute demo and be amazed.
Leveraging NSX Firewall on top of your VSphere 7 environment allows you to easily and quickly operationalize segmentation at scale. So don’t wait any longer — start your journey to achieve your segmentation goals and prevent lateral movement inside the data center.
