The Best Network Segmentation Tools

Network segmentation is increasingly being adopted by many organizations because of the control and visibility it provides for network administrators. In particular, the ever-growing size and complexity of networks make it difficult for anyone to stay on top of their security. Network segmentation helps in this regard, as it divides the network based on physical or logical divisions. This creates smaller chunks within a large network, thereby making it easy for network administrators to manage its security and availability.

Here is our list of the best network segmentation tools:

1. VMware NSX This network virtualization and security software creates virtual switches and routers to control the traffic that passes through the network.
2. Nutanix This unified platform makes it easy to manage data centers, private and public clouds, hybrid environments, and edges through a single platform.
3. Tufin This network segmentation and micro-segmentation tool improves the complexity of managing your fragmented networks.
4. AlgoSec This platform enables you to easily segment your network while ensuring that the segmentation and future changes adhere to your security policies and compliance.
5. Akamai Guardicore This fast and intuitive micro-segmentation tool enables you to gain the benefits of segmentation while providing the control and visibility you need to manage your network.

Read on for a detailed description of each of these tools.

This discussion brings up an important question: how to implement network segmentation? The good news is that many tools can handle this process, so read on to learn about the best network segmentation tools available today.

The Best Network Segmentation Tools

1. VMware NSX

VMware NSX takes a software-defined approach to networking, as it creates virtual switches and routers to handle your network segmentation. Essentially, it decouples your network from the underlying hardware, giving you more flexibility to route traffic. Furthermore, it helps you build a smart network that's consistent with your organization's security policies. Plus, you can implement automation across multiple cloud environments.

VMware NSX comes loaded with many convenient features that you can use to have better control and visibility over your network.

Key Features:

• Simplifies Networking and Security With Automation: VMware NSX reduces the operational complexity of your network by allowing you to automate repetitive tasks. By decoupling networking from hardware, NSX helps modernize your IT infrastructure. Also, it speeds up the move to digital transformation by virtualizing some aspects of your network. In particular, the flexibility you get with VMware NSX is unmatched. You can combine cloud-native applications with DevOps workflows to streamline developer processes without having to retool for new app development. Additionally, VMware NSX integrates well with many tools like Aria Automation, Terraform, and Ansible for greater extensibility.
• Enhances the Efficiency of your Data Center Operations: With VMware NSX, you can greatly improve the efficiency of your data center operations. It allows you to easily move workloads across all the sites and cloud platforms while ensuring continuity with advanced disaster recovery. This means you can easily move, rebalance, and migrate workloads with a network software overlay. VMware NSX also helps you consolidate your racks for easy consolidation of your resources. As a result, you can improve the resilience and consistency of your applications. This software also supports bulk workload migration to simplify onboarding. Furthermore, its centralized dashboard enables quicker identification of the root cause, resulting in faster troubleshooting.
• Offers Built-in Security to Thwart Cyberattacks: VMware NSX comes with a built-in security stack that offers protection to all its components. It uses a zero trust policy, which means, users and devices have to identify and authenticate themselves to gain access to a resource. This process reduces the chances of unauthorized access. From a network administrator's standpoint, VMware NSX greatly simplifies security operations and costs and provides greater control over network operations.
• Eases the Process of Building a Multi-cloud Network: VMware makes it easy to build a multi-cloud network comprising private, public, and hybrid clouds. As a result, you can apply a consistent security policy to protect your IT infrastructure from ransomware and other cyberattacks. At the same time, it provides comprehensive visibility into the network's operations, so you can implement security automation where needed.

In all, VMware NSX is an advanced tool that simplifies the process of implementing virtual networks in both physical environments and virtual servers. Its many features make it a comprehensive solution for organizations of all sizes.

VMware NSX offers three pricing editions:

• Professional: For organizations that have public cloud endpoints and want to implement automated networking and micro-segmentation.
• Advanced: For organizations with multiple sites. This edition comes with advanced networking and security services.
• Enterprise Plus: The most advanced platform that includes all of VMware NSX's offerings.

Talk to an expert to know the pricing of each of these editions. Try VMware NSX in its hands-on lab.

2. Nutanix

 

Nutanix is a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution that links multiple nodes or servers and bundles them into a cluster, along with processors, hard disks, and network interfaces. A key aspect of Nutanix is that the clustering is efficient enough to distribute workloads and optimize performance. In the process, redundancy is also built into the clustering to ensure the constant availability of your platform.

Key Features:

• Multiple Options for Different Traffic Types: A salient feature of Nutanix is that it offers multiple ways to segment your network based on your organization's goals and traffic types. For example, you can segment the network on an existing cluster with the Prism console. Also, you can segment the network when creating a new cluster. For this, you must use Nutanix Foundation 3.11.2 or higher. Again, your choice depends on the type of traffic that passes through your network. For example, to isolate the back plane traffic that's on an existing cluster, you can use VLAN-based segmentation. Similarly, you can physically isolate the back plane traffic from the management traffic. Such flexibility can greatly ease your segmentation process.
• Modern your Data Center Through Network Segmentation: You can use Nutanix to modernize your data center and simplify its management. At the same time, you can continue to keep your data centers resilient and secure. While segmenting your network with Nutanix, you can use its advanced distributed consistency algorithms to protect against hardware/site failure. This way, you can ensure that your most demanding applications have the necessary resources to perform predictably and optimally.
• Supports Micro Segmentation and Virtual Networking: When you microsegment your network, you have greater control over its operations. In particular, you can reduce the attack surface and the spread of malware across your devices. These are important aspects from a cybersecurity standpoint. Also, with micro-segmentation, you can identify the right configuration using advanced machine-learning models.
• Centralized Management of Your Infrastructure: With Nutanix, you can manage all your resources through a centralized console. Undoubtedly, it reduces your technology sprawl and the resulting technical resources needed to maintain it. At the same time, you can view all the activities on your screen through a single portal. Additionally, it enables you to respond quickly to the changing dynamics of your external environment.

Overall, Nutanix is an efficient solution to deploy and manage IT services through efficient segmentation.

Contact the sales team for a custom quote. Test drive Nutanix.

3. Tufin

Tufin is an advanced network segmentation tool that enables you to visualize and manage the segmentation process across multiple fragmented networks. In particular, it works well in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment.

Key Features:

• Identifies Access Violations Across Environments: A salient feature of Tufin is that it identifies access violations across both physical and virtual environments in real-time. As a result, you can respond to these violations quickly and even eliminate them. More importantly, you can ensure that your entire network is always in compliance with your organization's security policies. This leads to compliance with many industry standards and frameworks as well.
• Makes it Easy to Manage Complex Networks: Another key benefit of Tufin is that it eases the process of managing complex networks. With this tool, you can create network segmentation even if your network includes legacy firewalls. Above all, you can have complete control and visibility over your network and its segments through a central console.
• Enables Zero-Touch Automation for Better Security Posture: With Tufin, you can design and automate the execution of your security policy uniformly across your entire IT infrastructure. Tufin offers both semi-automated and fully-automated provisioning. Besides, you can use automation to decommission resources, clone servers, and more. Such automation capabilities help you meet the compliance requirements of different standards. You can even subscribe to get real-time alerts in the case of policy violations. In addition, you can easily maintain the security posture of your organization because it comes with documentation of exceptions.
• Optimizes Firewall for Business Agility: Firewall optimization is essential for network segmentation to ensure the smooth flow of traffic across your sub-networks. Tufin enables you to analyze and optimize your traditional firewall and NGFW device configurations automatically. It also enables you to centralize the firewall's performance, so you can remove unwanted rules that impact your network flow. You can even define the least privilege configurations, based on the nature of your network traffic.

Overall, Tufin comes with a zero-trust architecture to secure your on-premises and cloud environments. It also uses a powerful security automation feature to segment your network for better control and visibility.

Get a custom quote from Tufin. Sign up for a demo to learn more about Tufin's capabilities.

4. AlgoSec

AlgoSec is a network segmentation platform that enables you to quickly and easily create traffic flow across your network segments. Plus, it also assesses the impact of any changes made to your network segmentation and configuration.

Key Features:

• Eases Network Management with Comprehensive Visualization: AlgoSec creates a visualization of your network and its segments for easy visibility. With this tool, you can discover, identify, and map all the business applications, connectivity flows, security policies, and devices that exist within your subnetwork. This way, you have comprehensive control and visibility over what happens in each sub-network, At the same time, you can also visualize your network topology across multiple environments.
• Helps with Compliance With Standards: Another key feature of AlgoSec is its help with compliance. Essentially, it analyzes different applications and their connections and alerts you when there is potential non-compliance. It also stays on top of configuration changes and sends notifications when applications expose you to the risk of non-compliance. More importantly, it generates the audit reports you need to comply with key policies like PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, and more.
• Supports Micro-segmentation and the Resultant Integrations: Besides broad segmentation, AlgoSec also supports micro-segmentation. It automatically discovers applications and their connectivity flows. Accordingly, it designs your segmentation zones and makes it easy to define the allowed traffic across your network segments. Moreover, it also integrates well with software-defined micro-segmentation platforms like Cisco ACI and VMware NSX.
• Multiple Business Benefits: The different features of AlgoSec provide multiple benefits for your business. Firstly, it enables you to apply your security policies uniformly across all your segments. With such effective segmentation, AlgoSec limits the lateral movement of cyberattacks across your network. It essentially limits it to the segment that was infected. Other benefits of implementing AlgoSec include a reduction in network outages, a scalable approach, and continuous compliance.

In all, AlgoSec is an easy-to-use segmentation platform that helps you quickly segment your network and leverage the many benefits that come with this process.

Get a custom quote. Have a look at AlgoSec's demo before deciding.

5. Akamai Guardicore

Akamai Guardicore is a software-based tool for implementing micro-segmentation in your network. It uses a combination of agent-based sensors, data collectors, and flow logs to map your network. Based on this map, you can intuitively segment your network to enforce security policies, meet compliance, and better manage your network.

Key Features:

• Automatically Discovers Applications and Traffic Flows: Guardicore automatically discovers the applications on your network and their connectivity. Based on this discovery, it maps the traffic flow across your network. The advantage of this feature is that you can visualize all communication and activities in your network. Also, it is flexible and allows you to add metadata and orchestration data when needed. In particular, this can help your security team do an inventory of assets for better control and policy application.
• Enables you to Enforce Security: With Guardicore's segmentation, you can limit the lateral movement of cyber attackers in your organization. Also, it enables you to implement security policies at the network and process levels. Plus, its integrated breach detection and notification process alerts you to any policy violations. It also points to the nature of the attack so that you can secure it for the future.
• Implements Zero Trust Segmentation: Akamai Guardicore is based on a zero-trust policy, which means no device or entity can automatically access a resource within a network. It has to specifically authenticate itself to access a resource. This feature adds another layer of security to your network. More importantly, it protects your critical assets from ransomware.

Overall, Akamai Guardicore is a secure tool for segmenting your network into manageable parts. It is intuitive to use and works well across all environments.

Final Thoughts

Network segmentation is a critical tool for breaking down a large and complex network into smaller subnets for better management. You can gain the benefits of network segmentation through the tools mentioned in this article, like VMware NSX, Nutanix, Tufin, AlgoSec, and Akamai Guardicore. VMware NSX and Akamai Guardicore provide a software-defined approach to networking. Nutanix, on the other hand, offers multiple options for different traffic types, making it a versatile tool for network segmentation. AlgoSec and Tufin are popular platforms that handle end-to-end network segmentation for you. Regardless of the tool used, network segmentation should be a priority to improve your network's security and manageability.

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