Network automation platforms are products that automate and orchestrate multiple vendors’ network functionality. These platforms support a broad range of capabilities including provisioning, deprovisioning, orchestration, troubleshooting, operations, workflow, configuration management, event-driven automation, validation and reporting. These platforms are well-suited to add value on top of existing point network automation tools by orchestrating end-to-end network workflows across existing automation tools. Network automation platforms interact directly with network devices, other automation and orchestration tools, network management systems/controllers, and/or network services. These platforms increase agility and efficiency of network infrastructure while lowering costs; reducing the amount of manual human errors; and improving compliance with required rules, regulations and laws.
Gartner defines network security microsegmentation — also referred to as zero-trust network segmentation — as an effort that can create more granular and dynamic access policies than traditional network segmentation (often north-south traffic segmentation). It allows the insertion of a security policy between any two workloads in the same broadcast domain — with microsegmentation technologies narrowing fine-grained network zones down to individual assets and applications. Microsegmentation tools support the implementation of finer-grained zoning across public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Security and risk management (SRM) leaders must understand the key features, use cases, and role of microsegmentation in their environment, as well as determine which model is the best fit for their needs.
VA solutions identify, categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities as well as orchestrate their remediation or mitigation. Their primary focus is vulnerability and security configuration assessments for enterprise risk identification and reduction, and reporting against various compliance standards. VA can be delivered via on-premises, hosted and cloud-based solutions, and it may use appliances and agents. Core capabilities include: - Discovery, identification and reporting on device, OS, software vulnerabilities and configuration against security-related criteria - Establishing a baseline for systems, applications and databases to identify and track changes in state - Reporting options for compliance, control frameworks and multiple roles Standard capabilities include: - Pragmatic remediation prioritization with the ability to correlate vulnerability severity, asset context and threat context that then presents a better picture of true risk for your specific environment - Guidance for remediating and configuring compensating controls - Management of scanner instances, agents and gateways - Direct integration with, or API access to, asset management tools, workflow management tools and patch management tools