What is East-West security?

     The monitoring and inspection of traffic travelling laterally within the network perimeter in order to identify and block known and new dangers as well as unlawful access is known as east-west security.

Threat actors will eventually discover a way around modern perimeter firewalls, which means that all internal network traffic is now exposed and must be safeguarded, according to East-West security.

Why is East-West security important?

The distributed nature of modern networks, as well as the increasingly permeable perimeters that surround them, means that traffic within the network can no longer be trusted simply because it is within the network. Furthermore, because East-West travel now accounts for a much bigger percentage of total network traffic than North-South traffic, disregarding its potential threats is no longer an option.

Malicious actors that breach the network perimeter without the protection of East-West security controls can move laterally at will, lingering in the network, monitoring business activities, potentially stealing data, and/or causing damage.

East-West security has a number of advantages.

Security risks have always been viewed as originating from beyond a more or less secure perimeter. Businesses have realized that safeguarding internal traffic is vital to the sometimes widely scattered business processes as they modernize their networks.

In fact, with an East-West security solution like VMware's NSX Distributed Firewall, organizations can gain greater control and visibility over their networks, thanks to granular traffic flow inspection and policy-based management that dramatically reduces operational risk — and cost — while enabling the modern distributed enterprise.

East-West security is capable of:

  • Inspect all East-West network traffic.
  • Effectively block the lateral movement of threat actors.
  • Increase network visibility down to the workload level.
  • Protect apps and data vital to the business.
  • Lower costs and risk for distributed operations.

What is the mechanism for East-West security?

East-West security uses improved visibility to analyze lateral traffic flows within the network, identifying potentially dangerous network behaviors such as known and undiscovered threats and restricting their lateral migration.

To detect and stop attacks, a complete approach to East-West security includes evaluating every packet and workload. It monitors all traffic flows by combining deep application awareness and visibility with a sophisticated grasp of application topologies. The following are some of the components of such a solution: 

Internal Firewall: Uses policy-based controls to enable network segmentation and granular inspection of all East-West traffic.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDS/IPS): Watches for malicious activity on the network, identifying lateral movement and stopping it where it occurs.

Advanced Threat Analysis: Complete sandboxing and analysis of potential malware traversing the data center, as well as accurate detection and prevention of advanced threats, such as zero-day assaults.



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