If you’re a security architect or CISO, these famous words of Lt. General Lewis “Chesty” Puller may hold visceral meaning for you:

“We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded.”

You, too, are surrounded by a smart and aggressive adversary who is constantly probing your defenses, seeking to wreak havoc. Increasingly, they’re leveraging cutting-edge automation to attack at scale, counting on one of thousands of attempts to successfully breach your perimeter. After that initial compromise, they’ll move laterally through your environment to locate your critical resources so they can degrade your operations, steal sensitive data, or encrypt your critical systems for ransom.

Like General Puller’s forces, you’re being threatened from every cardinal direction, North-South and East-West. There are many methods used to attack from outside your perimeter, in the so-called North-South plane: compromising identity, social engineering, phishing…the list is long and ever-evolving. And once they gain that small initial breach, they’ll use one of thousands of lateral movement attack tactics in the East-West plane to turn that initial compromise into a business crisis. You need to cover both attack vectors to maintain continuity of operations and protect your critical systems, North-South and East-West.

That’s where the partnership of ColorTokens and Netskope can help. ColorTokens Xshield Enterprise Microsegmentation Platform and Netskope One Private Access work together as a unified Zero Trust architecture.

ColorTokens Xshield enforces granular microsegmentation across and between cloud, data centers, containers, OT, and IoT, preventing unauthorized lateral movement.

Netskope One Private Access delivers identity-driven Zero Trust Network Access, securing user-to-application connectivity without legacy VPN complexity.

When you use Netskope and ColorTokens, you can have confidence that your enterprise is protected in both the North-South and East-West attack vectors.

Access the Xshield and Netskope Integration Brief to Unify Microsegmentation and ZTNA

And even better, the two companies have collaborated to deliver an integrated solution that is easier to operate and maintain. Traditionally, every infrastructure change in the modern, dynamic enterprise landscape required manual updates to ZTNA policies — creating operational overhead and the risk of policy drift. With this integration, Xshield automatically updates Netskope One’s Private Access policies — ensuring users connect only to valid, protected resources. Together, they create a synchronized, closed-loop enforcement system.

Here is an example: When a new web server is added to an Xshield segment, it automatically inherits the correct microsegmentation policies via Xshield’s auto-tagging. Because of the integration, Netskope Private Access is automatically updated to allow secure user access, without administrative effort. Likewise, when that server is removed, access is revoked automatically. Security and connectivity stay perfectly aligned.

Now let’s consider a threat scenario: If a database server becomes compromised, it can be quarantined by simply moving it out of its Xshield segment. That change immediately updates Netskope, removing user access within seconds, reducing exposure and accelerating containment.

The result of using ColorTokens and Netskope together is a continuously adaptive Zero Trust posture — where access and internal controls stay aligned, risks are contained faster, and security keeps pace with change. 

To see how the joint solution delivers synchronized enforcement across both North-South and East-West planes, explore the ColorTokens and Netskope Joint Solution Brief.

Ready to eliminate security gaps and build a continuously adaptive Zero Trust architecture?  Contact us to learn more.

The post It’s an East-West, North-South Thing: ColorTokens and Netskope Have You Covered from All Directions  appeared first on ColorTokens.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from ColorTokens authored by Bob Palmer. Read the original post at: https://colortokens.com/blogs/microsegmentation-xshield-netskope-integration-zero-trust/