Implementing Microsegmentation with Guardicore

When to Use

• When implementing east-west traffic controls to prevent lateral movement within data centers
• When needing application-level visibility into network communication patterns before writing segmentation policies
• When segmenting workloads across heterogeneous environments (VMs, containers, bare metal, cloud)
• When compliance frameworks (PCI DSS, HIPAA) require network segmentation validation
• When deploying zero trust at the network layer with process-level granularity

Do not use for perimeter-only security (use traditional firewalls), for environments with fewer than 50 workloads where VLANs/security groups suffice, or when network team lacks capacity for ongoing policy management.

Prerequisites

• Akamai Guardicore Segmentation license (Enterprise or Premium)
• Guardicore Management Server deployed (on-prem or SaaS)
• Agent deployment access to target workloads (Linux, Windows, Kubernetes)
• Network visibility: SPAN/TAP ports or VPC flow logs for agentless collection
• Application owner engagement for dependency validation