Akamai Technologies Inc. today announced new artificial intelligence-powered capabilities for its Guardicore Segmentation platform that are aimed at improving zero-trust security in hybrid and multicloud environments.

The new capabilities use AI to discover, understand and explain application behavior and then generate precise, enforcement-ready policies to allow organizations to accelerate segmentation initiatives, strengthen controls with confidence and stay ahead of increasingly automated, AI-driven threats.

The release seeks to address the issue whereby, as workloads rapidly evolve, attackers can exploit lateral movement faster than security teams can react. Akamai argues that legacy microsegmentation tools leave customers guessing and afraid to enforce controls.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s new features address the issue caused by legacy tools by enabling ongoing discovery, customer-specific intelligence, proof-driven enforcement and continuous assurance. As a result, organizations can safely reduce their attack surface and sustain measurable risk reduction at scale.

The new enhancements include continuous discovery that allows for always-current understanding, faster time to visibility and stronger foundations for zero trust. Complementary proof-driven enforcement reduces the attack surface and increases the ability to scale up zero-trust without adding headcount, overcoming the fear of outages.

The new AI features understand applications and automatically discover application behavior, generate and explain segmentation policies at large scale, simulate impact and validate readiness before enforcement. All that, it says, reduces manual effort and operational risk.

Other new features include continuous risk containment that includes in-depth analysis that correlates exposure-aware detection with segmentation enforcement and delegated application owner workflows that allow application owners to accelerate approvals, reduce friction and zero trust into operation at enterprise scale.

“These enhancements to Akamai Guardicore Segmentation change the equation by applying AI-powered segmentation across the full lifecycle of risk containment, from continuous discovery to intelligent understanding and runtime assurance to exposure analysis and response,” explained Ofer Wolf, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise security at Akamai. “Our new AI capability never stops learning about what risks exist and how they behave. It transforms intelligence into enforcement-ready protection, validating safety before impact and enabling organizations to reduce their attack surface.”

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation can help organizations operating hybrid IT, cloud, Kubernetes and AI workloads that are seeking to reduce lateral movement risk, ransomware and impact while also meeting increasing audit, compliance and governance requirements.

Akamai is demonstrating the new capabilities at the RSAC Conference in San Francisco March 23-26.

Photo: Akamai