Micro-Segmentation Builds Security Into Your K-12 Data Center’s DNA

Most education IT professionals agree that securing the network only at the perimeter is inadequate for the demands put on today’s district and school data centers. Once malware has managed to make its way behind the perimeter firewall by latching onto an authorized user (or other means), it can move easily from workload to workload. This lateral movement is possible due to a lack of sufficient internal network controls regulating server-to-server or east-west network traffic.

Micro-segmentation, enabled by E-Rate eligible VMware NSX®, is a breakthrough model for data center security. Network security policies are enforced by firewall controls integrated into hypervisors that are already distributed throughout the data center. This enables security that is both ubiquitous and granular, placing security policies close enough to workloads and applications to give them rich context while keeping them removed enough to have isolation from threats. Security policies also become more dynamic by being coupled directly to the workload, moving, changing, and being deleted as required.