From Fragmented Fences to Cohesive Control
The attack surface for today’s enterprises is incredibly heterogeneous and dynamic. Applications and data are in constant motion, spanning public clouds, private data centers and edge locations. Users connect from anywhere.
For security leaders, this environment has led to an explosion in not only operational complexity, but in many cases, uncertainty. Together, Nutanix and Palo Alto Networks enable security to finally match the speed and scale of these dynamic hybrid cloud environments.
The security ecosystem has become vast and complex. Point solutions accumulate to address specific gaps, yet each adds another interface, another policy language and another integration to manage. However well intentioned, this sprawl can lead directly to fractured visibility, overlapping tools and operational fatigue.
Elevate Perimeter Protection to Defense-in-Depth
Enterprises today face unprecedented security complexity as hybrid and multicloud environments become the new normal. Currently, 94% of enterprises use some form of cloud service, while 89% report having a multicloud strategy in place. This distributed reality means security is paramount: while managing cloud spending is the number one operational challenge (82% overall), security remains a major concern, affecting 79% of all organizations.
Hybrid cloud adoption offers agility, but it also introduces distinct security challenges that strain traditional approaches. Adversaries have taken notice. Hybrid and multicloud environments are prime targets because they connect sensitive data, privileged accounts and critical systems across public, and on-premises infrastructure. Perimeter-based security models, built for static networks and centralized data centers, cannot keep pace in a world where apps and data continuously move between platforms.
Defense-in-depth has become essential for addressing the inherent dynamism of today’s environments. Network visibility is required to monitor and contain east-west traffic and lateral movement of threats inside cloud environments. Identity controls must verify every user, device and interaction across a distributed workforce. Data protection must follow sensitive information as it traverses multiple clouds, data centers and edge locations.
Yet managing these protections as distinct layers is no longer viable. Each cloud provider introduces its own native security controls. Each additional tool adds another interface and another policy set to maintain. Defense-in-depth only achieves its purpose when its layers are fully unified, providing consistent control enforcement from the edge to the core, comprehensive visibility across traffic, and essential data protections for all workloads, wherever they reside.
Freedom of Choice Without Fragmentation
Hybrid environments span public clouds, private infrastructure, SaaS ecosystems and legacy on-premises systems. No single vendor can realistically cover that entire landscape, and forcing security into a single closed ecosystem risks creating gaps where those environments meet.
The answer lies in an open ecosystem approach that allows organizations to assemble best-of-breed capabilities rather than being locked into a single provider’s stack.
This flexibility empowers security teams to adapt to the unique requirements of each environment while still operating through a unified security model. Policies can be applied consistently, intelligence can be shared across layers, and protections can move in step with workloads, regardless of platform. In short, this model can effectively support freedom of choice while relieving the operational burden of managing hybrid and multicloud security.
A Unified Security Layer Across Every Environment
Open ecosystems solve the problem of choice. What remains is the challenge of bringing those best-of-breed capabilities together into a solution that is coherent and scalable.
To transform defense-in-depth from a conceptual framework into a practical system aligned to the realities of hybrid and multicloud deployments, this unified layer should be built on core capabilities:
- Inline visibility for east-west traffic within virtualized and cloud environments, enabled by deploying next-generation firewalls directly inside virtual private networks:
This approach inspects workload-to-workload traffic, identifies anomalous behavior and stops lateral movement before it spreads. - Consistent policy enforcement across public cloud, private data centers and edge locations through a centralized management plane:
A single set of policies should be authored once and pushed everywhere, assuring a consistent security posture across all clouds and environments. - Abstraction of security intent from network coordinates through tag-driven automation, an approach that allows security policies to be expressed in terms of workload attributes (rather than IPs or locations):
These protections follow workloads automatically as they move. Through integration with orchestration pipelines, this approach aligns controls with rapid application rollouts in CI/CD workflows, all without manual reconfiguration.
With these core capabilities, security can finally catch up to the fluidity promised by hybrid cloud operating models.
Explore how Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix, work together to make this unified vision a reality, including joint offerings, like Palo Alto Networks secured Nutanix clusters with VM-Series Firewalls for AWS® and Microsoft® Azure.