How Cisco Uses the Isovalent Platform to Secure Cloud Workloads

[ad_1] As cloud setting evolve, environment friendly and efficient workload safety has been on the high of the checklist. At Cisco, now we have built-in the Isovalent platform into our infrastructure to make sure our cloud workloads are protected with out compromising on efficiency.

Why Isovalent?

The Isovalent platform is predicated on the eBPF (prolonged Berkeley Packet Filter) expertise that gives a really trendy method to securing cloud-native environments. The place conventional safety options often fail to maintain up with the dynamic and scalable nature of containers, Isovalent’s zero-trust networking and light-weight, extremely environment friendly community observability and safety instruments, all come tailored for Kubernetes environments.

Isovalent embeds safety on the kernel degree to supply identity-based safety, community segmentation, and site visitors visibility with out the overhead that’s often related to legacy options. Which means Cisco can higher shield our workloads and scale with seamless community coverage enforcement in our rising cloud infrastructure.

Reaching compliance

Regulatory compliance is among the most crucial features of our operation right here at Cisco, much more so in high-security-demanding industries. Isovalent has been very instrumental in serving to us obtain FedRAMP compliance by offering encryption and being absolutely FIPS-compliant. This ensures that each one knowledge in transit is encrypted, securing delicate info at each layer.

Past encryption, Isovalent supplies a platform with deep observability into community flows, which permits us to watch, observe, and implement insurance policies with a excessive diploma of granularity. With the power to audit site visitors and detect anomalies, we guarantee full compliancy with the strictest business requirements whereas sustaining full management over our cloud setting.

Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium supplies sturdy help for essential FedRAMP controls, making it a safe selection for federal prospects. Two of probably the most important controls that Cilium affords are:

1.SC-8(1) — Transmission confidentiality and integrity

The Cilium agent leverages superior Linux kernel applied sciences resembling eBPF, IPsec, and the Linux Kernel Crypto API Cryptographic Module.Cilium features equally to a Service Mesh element by offering community safety, observability, and coverage enforcement capabilities, as outlined within the DoD’s Kubernetes reference design. This design permits safe and environment friendly communication between providers throughout the Kubernetes setting.In contrast to conventional Service Mesh options that depend on a sidecar mannequin, Cilium’s eBPF integration permits it to work together straight with the Linux kernel’s TCP/IP layer.Cilium installs eBPF and XDP (eXpress Knowledge Path) packages on every Kubernetes node, enabling seamless communication between pods on the identical node by way of the loopback interface. This method minimizes overhead, permitting for environment friendly packet processing that reduces latency and CPU utilization, thereby bettering efficiency and safety.

2. SC-13 — Cryptographic safety

Cilium makes use of the IPsec suite for clear data-in-transit encryption, protecting a number of protocols resembling HTTP, TCP, UDP, and Multicast.Helps FIPS compliance, assembly FedRAMP Excessive necessities in environments like Amazon GovCloud.Makes use of the FIPS-compliant AES-GCM encryption algorithm with key lengths of 128 to 256 bits.Leverages the NIST CMVP (Cryptographic Module Validation Program) for the relevant Linux distribution, resembling Amazon Linux 2 Kernel Crypto API Cryptographic Module CMVP#4593.

With such capabilities, Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium permits federal businesses to safe their Kubernetes-based workloads underneath strict FedRAMP requirements, additional guaranteeing knowledge confidentiality and integrity.

Conclusion

Integrating the Isovalent platform into Cisco’s cloud infrastructure has elevated our safety capabilities to take care of compliance, shield our workloads, and scale with confidence. Its superior, eBPF-based safety answer has proved to be a should for safeguarding all our cloud-native operations whereas tending to the endless stream of business laws resembling FedRAMP. With Isovalent, we’ve achieved the proper stability between sturdy safety and operational effectivity.