Attackers don't stop at the perimeter — they move laterally. Illumio's AI-powered breach containment platform sees every connection, contains attacks in real time, and stops one compromised workload from becoming an enterprise-wide event.
Identity, perimeter and app controls all matter — but once an attacker is inside, the network is where they travel. Flat, over-connected networks let a single foothold reach everything.
From a single phishing click or unpatched VM, attackers pivot across servers, OT, endpoints and cloud workloads. The longer they move undetected, the closer they get to your crown jewels.
Once inside, east-west traffic is rarely inspected or restricted.
Data center, public cloud and remote endpoints share one flat fate.
Detection works — stopping the spread is where most teams struggle.
Legacy defenses watch north-south traffic entering and leaving — but most attacks travel east-west, between internal systems, where flows go uninspected.
Prevention will eventually be bypassed. Segmentation determines whether a breach is survivable — addressing the exact control gap that modern attacks make urgent.
You can't stop movement you can't see. Illumio gives live visibility into all communication paths and implicit trust relationships.
Segmentation prevents one compromised workload from becoming an enterprise-wide event.
When prevention is fallible — and it will be — segmentation determines whether a breach is survivable.
Illumio limits lateral movement regardless of the exploit used. You don't need to know the CVE for the policy to hold.
Visibility and segmentation feed a single Zero Trust Segmentation Platform — spanning cloud, data center and endpoints — so the same controls power dozens of security and compliance use cases.
Complete coverage of lateral movement risk — proactively reducing exposure, and reactively containing what gets through.
Microsegmentation turns one open network into thousands of isolated zones. A breach in one workload stays in one workload.
Least-privilege policy by application, environment and role draws a perimeter around every workload — across data center, public cloud and users. The attack hits a wall instead of an open plain.
Protect the assets that matter without redesigning the network.
Every other path is denied by default — lateral movement has nowhere to go.
Model each rule against real traffic in draft mode, then switch enforcement on with confidence — no outages, no guesswork.
From the mainframe to cloud-native — one consistent policy model across every platform in your estate, enforced by a lightweight VEN on hosts or fully agentless in the cloud. No workload is left unsegmented.
iSeries, zOS & midrange
Network modulesAIX, Solaris, Oracle Exadata
Stateful host firewallVMware, Windows, Linux VMs
Stateful host firewallWindows, macOS, VDI
Stateful host firewallKubernetes, OpenShift
Agentless or container VENServerless, PaaS, managed DB
Agentless cloud controlsThe Policy Compute Engine ingests resource & flow data and computes least-privilege rules; lightweight enforcement nodes apply them on every workload — and adapt the moment anything changes.
Flexible labeling, not brittle IPs.
Virtual Enforcement Node uses the host's own firewall.
Risk is scored continuously across every flow and resource — so analysts triage the threats that matter first, then quarantine with one click.
Pinpoint exposed RDP & SMB paths and the workloads ransomware would use to spread.
Flag inbound and outbound traffic to known-bad IPs, scored against live threat intel.
Surface high-risk protocols — SSH, VNC, TeamViewer, RustDesk — and exactly where they're exposed.
Detect unsanctioned AI and LLM traffic leaving your environment before data does.
Watch for unusual outbound volume that signals exfiltration in progress.
Map flows against DORA, PCI and regional scopes for audit-ready resilience reporting.
Flow logs in, security observability out — proven at scale for over a decade. No hardware, no agents, observability in minutes.
read-only · agentless
Containers spin up in seconds — your security should too. Illumio segments containerized hosts alongside the rest of your environment, with one consistent label-based policy across Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.
Microservices expand the attack surface, and native cloud controls work in silos. Illumio segments both containerized and non-containerized apps under one policy model.
See clusters and pod-to-pod traffic in one application dependency map — alongside VMs, on-prem and cloud.
Policy by label and business context, enforced close to the workload.
Policy adjusts as namespaces, pods and services change — no manual scripts, no CI/CD delays.
Automatically find namespaces, pods and services as teams create them — no manual setup.
Container workload profiles apply a default policy across clusters the instant a pod starts.
Ready-made policies protect cluster nodes and core services, separate from the workloads on them.
Define and test segmentation policy in plan, build and test; enforce and monitor in deploy. Illumio translates high-level policy into firewall rules automatically — no thousands of hand-written rules.
Segment by role, application, environment (dev / test / prod) and location.
High-level policy compiles to detailed rules automatically — devs stay devs.
See traffic in real time and immediately block infected systems from the network.
"Illumio has played a critical role in allowing us to better understand our risk, control security policy, and secure our data."
One policy model, four enforcement contexts. Each environment has its own breach-containment wins — here's what teams deploy Illumio to do in each.
Lateral movement looks different in every industry — but the containment outcome is the same. Here's what regulated and critical-infrastructure teams deploy Illumio to achieve.
Banks, insurers & trading platforms under SWIFT CSP and PCI DSS.
Agencies and defense under federal Zero Trust mandates.
Plants, automotive & industrial with converged IT/OT estates.
Global enterprises running sprawling hybrid, multi-cloud estates.
Carriers & ISPs protecting subscriber data and core networks.
Host-based, label-driven segmentation — compared to the platforms teams evaluate most.
| Capability | IllumioBreach Containment | Akamai GuardicoreSegmentation | VMware NSXBroadcom | CiscoSecure Workload |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No network re-architecture | Partial | |||
| Real-time AI security graph | Partial | |||
| Label-based (not IP) policy | Partial | Partial | ||
| Endpoint segmentation | Partial | |||
| Cloud detection & response | Partial | |||
| Test/model before enforcing | Partial | Partial | ||
| Agentless cloud-native coverage | Partial |
// comparison based on publicly available vendor information; capabilities vary by edition and configuration.
Start with visibility, add enforcement, extend to the endpoint — all on one AI Security Graph.
Agentless cloud detection & response that surfaces risky flows and active threats.
Microsegmentation across data center, cloud and IaaS — host-based and label-driven.
Stop ransomware moving laptop-to-laptop across your workforce.
Talk to Network365 about mapping your environment and deploying the Illumio Breach Containment Platform.