Kathy Gibson reports from Pinnacle Tech Tour – Cybersecurity is the biggest risk facing organisations in 2024, putting resellers under pressure to provide effective security solutions.
Pinnacle Enterprise distributes the Guardicore Centra solution, a micro-segmentation product that manages east-to-west traffic.
In a presentation at Pinnacle Tech Tour, Garrett Weber, director: solutions engineering at Guardicore, explains that Guardicore provides complete visibility across the whole environment through a single pane of glass.
The solution is an infrastructure-agnostic segmentation policy that works through a single policy set, with no networking changes, no networking team dependencies, and no application changes or downtime.
The solution is future-ready, Weber adds, as it works with DevOps and automation frameworks.
Instead of using legacy models, Guardicore employs a software-based approach and runs on legacy and modern systems – going as far back as Windows XP and right up to the most recent versions of operating systems.
It also supports containerised environments, cloud instances, virtual machines and bare metal.
Weber showed a live demonstration of how Guardicore Centra provides a live view of the system and a collection of deep flow data that allows administrators to understand how systems are behaving and how they integrate with the rest of the environment.
“So you can start to map out which systems are dependent on the server, and which one it is dependent on.”
Labels, using metadata, are applied to the system to position elements according to the systems that they are part of. And administrators can also use them to adjust their view according to applications and understand how they relate or connect to other parts of the environment.
Right up front, this allows administrators to identify and remove unwanted or malicious applications.
Before creating policies, administrators can use maps to measure how applications behave or connect so they can set procedures that take historical behaviour into account.
When creating policies, Guardicore provides both white lists and black lists. It is then quite simple to use the graphical interface to build rules – and these rules are easy to understand since they use natural language. And they are more flexible.
Policies can be segmented, and the system shows administrators how any policy will affect all the workflows that it impacts.
Once rules are in place, it’s easy to see what systems are involved, how traffic flows, and what processes are impacted. Policies can be fine-tuned quite easily at any time.
Guardicore Centra can send any incidents to a variety of ticketing systems that administrators use to monitor their systems.