- Complete visibility across legacy, OT, and cloud systems through identification of known, unknown, and unmanaged assets
- AI inferencing and predictive policy stability algorithms to stop lateral movement
- Osquery-powered insights to detect high-risk platforms and devices in your environment
- Semantic AI labeling to enrich asset information for critical context, speed, and accuracy
- Process-to-packet correlation and ready-to-apply policies that automate threat validation and containment
- Akamai’s global edge for unmatched threat intelligence and faster incident response
- Contextual risk scoring for safe enforcement, grounded in application readiness, intent, and AI-driven business prioritization
- Cross-domain telemetry correlation of asset reachability, open admin ports, and risky tool usage to map exploitable paths and reduce exposure
- AI-driven threat hunting for fast insights to guide security decision-makers from evidence to action
Stop lateral movement with AI-powered microsegmentation
Accelerate Zero Trust enforcement across your hybrid cloud estate with AI that translates network- and process-level insights into immediate policy. By automating the discovery and policy creation process, you can limit lateral movement risk at machine speed — moving from visibility to granular control in seconds, not days or months.
Reduce risk exposure with a platform that keeps learning
How Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works
Key features of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation services
Zero Trust Segmentation for AI Agents
Aligning Anthropic’s guidance for securing AI agents with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s capabilities
Akamai Segmentation Impact Study 2025
Survey shows microsegmentation adoption surging — leading to faster breach containment, lower premiums, and easier audits.
Prepare for ransomware and modern exposure paths
AI-backed ransomware is evolving, with tactics like using DDoS and compliance as extortion tools. Learn to fight back.
Customer Stories
Key microsegmentation use cases
Explore what you can do with segmentation
Contain lateral movement and ransomware
Stop attackers from moving through your network by enforcing granular, application-aware policies that adapt as your environment changes and scales. By limiting unauthorized east-west communication, the platform reduces blast radius and prevents ransomware from spreading to critical assets.
Benefits
- Least-privilege enforcement: Limit communication based on real application behavior, not just static IP rules.
- Adaptive protection: Automatically update policies as workloads move or scale across hybrid environments.
- Blast radius reduction: Deliver provable, enforcement-ready controls that stop threats without disrupting uptime.
Ring-fence critical applications
Isolate high-value and business-critical applications by enforcing strict communication boundaries based on real dependencies. Akamai helps security teams give critical applications the focus they require by providing a visual map of how they work, making it easy to ring-fence them with precise segmentation policies that prevent unauthorized access from compromised neighboring systems.
Benefits
- Zero Trust isolation: Create granular perimeters around critical applications to prevent lateral movement.
- Dependency mapping: Continuously discover all necessary connections, preventing rule conflicts that lead to outages.
- Confident protection: Leverage AI for fast, evidence-based policy recommendations.
Support compliance and audit readiness
Provide provable, continuously-enforced segmentation controls that support strict audit, compliance, and governance requirements (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SWIFT). Software-based segmentation simplifies identifying assets in scope, segmenting them from the rest of your IT environment, and validating compliance with real-time and historical views.
Benefits
- Automated evidence: Generate real-time reports and visual maps that provide auditors with proof of enforced communication boundaries.
- Regulatory alignment: Map segmentation controls directly to Zero Trust frameworks and industry standards.
- Visualize in detail: See what’s communicating in your network and easily create labels for all assets subject to compliance mandates.
Protect hybrid cloud and multicloud workloads
Achieve consistent, application-aware segmentation across multicloud environments from a single control plane. Our AI-powered modeling translates raw network flows into clear application context and risk insight, allowing teams to see exactly how data moves across the hybrid estate and eliminating the security gaps caused by architectural silos. These benefits also extend to those who are migrating applications from on-premises into the cloud.
Benefits
- Cross-environment consistency: Apply the same visibility and policy controls to virtual machines, servers, and containers from a single pane of glass.
- Attack path visualization: Use AI to model dependencies and identify potential paths of exposure before they are exploited.
- Simplified correlation: Automatically identify known, unknown, and unmanaged assets to eliminate manual data gathering and act quicker to reduce exposure.
Secure OT and unmanaged devices
Extend enterprise-grade segmentation to OT, IoMT, and cyber-physical systems (CPS) where uptime is nonnegotiable and assets are often unpatchable. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation enables organizations to reduce their attack surface and enforce Zero Trust policies on devices that can’t run host-based security software.
Benefits
- Comprehensive discovery: Identify assets and map communications across OT environments and displayed alongside your other IT assets for better single view.
- Operational continuity: Enforce security policies that respect the specific safety and uptime requirements of industrial environments.
- Low-latency enforcement: Agentless enforcement capabilities for sensitive environments — at the network and host system layer with DPUs.
Protect dynamic cloud and container workloads
Secure short-lived, ephemeral workloads in Kubernetes and PaaS environments where IP-based and static controls drift. Continuous discovery and AI-driven intelligence ensure your segmentation policies remain accurate and enforceable as containers and other workloads spin up, scale, and disappear.
Benefits
- Identity-based security: In dynamic cloud and container environments, IP addresses will change, but identity persists. Security that binds to identity, not location, is what makes Zero Trust enforceable at scale.
- Continuous discovery: Automatically detect and map new cloud instances or K8s pods the moment they are deployed.
- Native enforcement: Deploy a solution that works consistently across multiple providers using native enforcement points.
Isolate AI workloads and data pipelines
Protect the high-value assets of the AI era, including model training clusters, inference services, and sensitive data pipelines. As GPU infrastructure and AI services expand, Akamai ensures these environments remain segmented and validated against emerging exposure paths and shadow AI growth.
Benefits
- AI infrastructure visibility: Automatically discover AI training nodes and inference APIs to prevent unauthorized access.
- Model asset protection: Enforce strict boundaries around model repositories and feature stores to prevent data exfiltration.
- Continuous validation: Ensure that as AI models and infrastructure evolve, segmentation policies remain accurate.
AI-accelerated incident investigation and response
Reduce incident response time by utilizing continuous AI-powered insights to understand the “intent” of application traffic. Akamai immediately surfaces an incident response plan that provides relevant and actionable steps to investigate and respond to incidents in your network. A continuously updated exposure assessment indexes incidents by severity and provides a path to resolution — in a single view.
Benefits
- AI-generated policy: Leverage machine learning to automatically suggest policies through intuitive templates and workflows.
- Accelerated containment: Use real-time visibility to quickly implement policy and limit the blast radius of a breach.
- Managed threat hunting: AI-powered threat investigation with human analysis to find and remediate threats.
Akamai Guardicore microsegmentation FAQs
Akamai Guardicore microsegmentation FAQs
It includes both agent-based and agentless options. This flexibility ensures that security and segmentation can be enforced across a wide range of environments. Deploying agents is recommended for achieving maximum visibility and control over network traffic and activities. Agentless is ideal for in-cloud PaaS, IoT, and OT environments.
It is a microsegmentation platform that uses AI and built-in controls to protect east-west traffic and enforce the core principle of Zero Trust — never trust, always verify. In 2025, Gartner stated: AI-driven microsegmentation, not static rule-based solutions, is the future of effectively safeguarding devices and networks from breaches.
Achieving Zero Trust in hybrid environments is often stalled by operational complexity. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation simplifies this through continuous discovery with AI-generated policy recommendations. It provides a single point of control across on-premises data centers, cloud instances, and Kubernetes containers. By using proof-driven enforcement, security teams can simulate the impact of security policies before they go live, eliminating the risk of business downtime while accelerating the path to Zero Trust maturity.
AI-powered microsegmentation uses machine learning to automatically discover network assets and map application dependencies. Unlike traditional firewalls, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation uses AI to understand the “intent” of application traffic. By enforcing least-privilege policies, it effectively contains ransomware by blocking the lateral movement attackers use to spread across a network. This ensures that even if one device is compromised, your critical business data remains isolated and secure.
These are the primary differentiators:
- Our AI understands applications — not just IP addresses. Instead of relying on static network attributes, our AI models application dependencies, process behaviors, and contextual signals to generate policies based on how applications actually function.
- Hybrid enforcement is built in — not bolted on. We support host-based enforcement, identity context, and integration across physical, virtual, cloud, containerized, and OT assets, enabling consistent segmentation across complex hybrid architectures.
- AI-driven policy generation accelerates time to value. Our AI suggests and stimulates segmentation policies based on behavioral baselines, reducing manual effort while allowing human validation before enforcement.
- We support both agent-based and agentless visibility. For environments where agents aren’t viable — including unmanaged, IoT, OT, and IoMT devices — Akamai Guardicore Segmentation supports passive monitoring and AI-driven profiling to extend segmentation coverage.
- Risk-based adaptive segmentation is native to the platform. Policies dynamically adapt based on workload risk signals, vulnerability posture, identity changes, and behavioral deviations — aligning enforcement with real-time risk scoring.
- A single, living map of your entire environment. From data center to cloud to Kubernetes to legacy infrastructure, every asset, every flow, and every dependency is visible in one place, updated in real time with process-level granularity. Rather than stitching together data from multiple tools, teams see their full security posture — traffic patterns, threat activity, and policy enforcement — in one unified interface built for hybrid, cloud, and OT environments.
Beyond policy enforcement, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is built to continuously understand your infrastructure, validate the effectiveness of current Zero Trust controls, detect real threats, reason on exposure for those threats with ranked recommendations, and safely enforce containment across hybrid environments.
As AI workloads, containers, and ephemeral infrastructure increase complexity, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s AI-based algorithm learns tens of thousands of applications and millions of flows faster than a human ever could — automatically labeling unknown assets, generating tailored policy recommendations, and maintaining segmentation accuracy at scale without the need to add more headcount.
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Stop attacks from spreading with microsegmentation
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation gives you better visibility to control and stop the spread.
Get real-time visibility and powerful control against lateral movement. See how Akamai Guardicore Segmentation helps you protect your network and stay ahead of attacks. Request your demo today.
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1Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Network Security Microsegmentation, Peer Contributors, 22 January 2026.
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