We've been able to secure older applications in a way that we really couldn't before, which has been a nice benefit. 

It's also allowed us to build out an entire new data center topology without having to worry so much about where we place physical or virtual firewalls that can create bottlenecks. We can focus more on building a really fast and responsive network topology. Security devices, things like a traditional firewall, can often be a bandwidth or throughput bottleneck. But with Guardicore, since the firewall is running on every single server individually, and they're working together, you can just build a really big, fast, redundant network and not have to worry so much about those security bottlenecks.

Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments.

One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. 

Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload.

Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads.

Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. 

However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.

We recently did a database migration from Solaris to Linux. The Solaris platform had dedicated hardware firewalls to segment it off. By moving to Linux, we were able to use Guardicore and do our network segmentation through it. Therefore, we didn't have to invest in hardware.

For an example of the capability of GuardiCore, I know one client who immediately after installing it in their data center, within the first 30 days, discovered a major problem. Two internal employees were stealing their proprietary code. They were copying it to a USB drive. That discovery alone justified to the client the cost of implementing the solution.

The change control in GuardiCore has improved our efficiency by over 75% in terms of implementing security policies. The efficiency of the security team was improved by over 100% in terms of analytics, monitoring, and responding to incidents. 

Most of our clients are small teams. Most of our security teams are three people or less, so these uptake numbers are for them.

It has given us better oversight of the traffic between our development and production environments and how we can stop unnecessary traffic, e.g., development teams accessing production can cause risks that you are not aware of. 

Guardicore Centra saves time when completing a segmentation project versus a traditional toolset. Since we already have a solution in place, we have a fitted process of removing the old segmentation and adding the new. However, you can run them in tandem so that is always a benefit; you can do it over time rather than as one big bang.

We have no downtime when we use Guardicore Centra for segmentation. This is important to us because we're an industrial company and we operate 24/7. We cannot afford to have even one minute of downtime, which is one of the reasons that we chose this solution.

We bought this system several months before the trouble with COVID happened. During that time, a lot of people started to work from outside of the organization. With all of the staff starting to work from home, other companies started to think about how to protect their servers when the users are outside. Also, attacks against endpoints and the data center were on the rise, so it was important to better protect them. I felt safe knowing that I had this kind of defense for the data center.

One example of this happened a few months ago when we received a letter that said we needed to update the on-premises Exchange server. It was a problem from Microsoft and it required that our server be updated to be more secure. Guardicore called us to say that they have witnessed cases where people from other countries were trying to use this exploit to get into the data center, so we blocked it immediately.

All of our servers are now behind Guardicore. The clients are not. From my perspective, the endpoint clients are attackers and my intention is to protect the servers.

We use Guardicore Centra mostly in security, because I'm in charge of security. It helps provide us with some alerts about some suspicious behaviors on some of the systems that we have been able to correct right away. That is the main benefit that we have with Guardicore Centra, other than doing micro-segmentation. 

We use it most for visibility. It has even provided good information about some of the connections that I am making in and out of the system. So, we are able to correct some behaviors and kill some applications that are suspicious to the infrastructure.

Once you are familiar with the tool, you can make segmentation rules, then apply them to all the agents. We have been securing some of the machines that we are using in Azure. In that way, we are able to put segmentation rules in those machines. We are saving with the Azure Firewall because we are using the Guardicore Centra agents, which gives us some advantages.

This particular product has a deployment model both in public and private clouds and on-premises. We are pitching it to all of our customers, irrespective of the regulations that they must follow. Some customers are in the government sector, for example, and they will need to go on-premises. There are some customers like IT service-based companies that have most of their infrastructure in the cloud, and those can use cloud-based services. What the client wants and needs totally depends on the type of client they are. We have an advantage with this product in offering it both ways — on cloud and on-premises — to meet the client's needs.

It will be a great deal for our partner as Guardicore provides excellent network and process visibility, allowing for advanced segmentation with a very friendly UI.