Securing Multi-Cloud with Cisco Umbrella & Secure Workload

Securing Multi-Cloud with Cisco Umbrella & Secure Workload 

Multi-Cloud Introduced Scale. It Also Broke Visibility. 

If your workloads now run across AWS, Azure, GCP, and private clouds, you’re not alone. That’s the norm for large Indian enterprises in cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. 

Ask your SecOps team where the traffic in your cloud is really coming from. Who’s talking to whom? Which ports are exposed? What should be allowed, and what absolutely shouldn't? 

If the answer involves pulling CSVs from multiple consoles and stitching them together in a spreadsheet, that’s a red flag. 

Cloud-native environments were built for flexibility, not for transparency. Traffic moves laterally between workloads, jumps regions, and crosses VPCs without triggering legacy firewalls. APIs open new frontiers, but they also open attack surfaces. Add shadow IT, short-lived containers, and infrastructure as code, and suddenly, security policies fall out of sync. Misconfigurations spike. Exposure expands. 

What you need isn’t more rules. You need better visibility, smarter policy enforcement, and the ability to contain threats, regardless of where they start or spread. 

This is where Cisco Umbrella and Secure Workload work together. 

Start with Cisco Umbrella: DNS-Layer Control for Cloud Edges 

Cisco Umbrella gives you a cloud-native enforcement point. Not in your data center. Not in a firewall cluster. But at the DNS layer, closest to where threats start. 

What Umbrella delivers: 

• DNS-layer protection that blocks connections to malicious or low-reputation domains 
• Cloud-based secure web gateway (SWG) for deeper inspection of URLs and files 
• Firewall-as-a-service for outbound traffic control by IP, port, and protocol 
• CASB-lite features to detect risky SaaS usage 

All of this is identity-aware and integrates with Active Directory or SAML, indicating your policies follow the user, not the device or site. Deploy it at your branch locations. On roaming laptops. In your IaaS egress. Umbrella reduces blind spots without increasing latency. 

Then Control the Blast Radius with Cisco Secure Workload 

Cisco Secure Workload (formerly Tetration) provides visibility and segmentation at the application level. 

Why this matters in multi-cloud setups: 

• Workloads shift between clouds. Security posture must follow. 
• East-west traffic often bypasses perimeter controls 
• Microservices can open unnecessary ports or call unapproved APIs 

Secure Workload does three things well: 

1. Application Dependency Mapping: It automatically builds a map of how workloads communicate across clusters, VMs, and containers. 
2. Policy Recommendation: It uses machine learning to suggest granular segmentation policies based on observed behaviour. 
3. Enforcement and Drift Detection: It enforces those policies in the workload's native format (iptables, Windows firewall, AWS SGs) and alerts if something changes. 

That means even if a workload is cloned, moved to another VNet, or launched in GCP instead of Azure, your policy follows. 

How It All Ties Together 

Umbrella inspects DNS and HTTP/S traffic at the edge. Secure Workload governs east-west movement inside your environment. 

Together, they help you: 

• Stop malware before it connects to C2 servers 
• Limit lateral movement if something does get in 
• Apply consistent identity-aware policies across cloud providers 
• Visualize communication patterns to spot misconfigurations 

Real-World Application: Indian Pharma and Multi-Cloud Security 

We worked with a pharmaceutical major in Pune that used AWS for analytics, Azure for Active Directory, and GCP for regulatory workloads. 

The challenge: developers had broad IAM permissions, some workloads were reachable over public IPs, and API logs weren’t being monitored. 

With Cisco Umbrella, we blocked all DNS requests to unclassified domains by default. With Secure Workload, we applied microsegmentation between production, dev, and QA workloads, enforced natively in each cloud. 

Result: 

• No code changes required 
• 48% reduction in exposed workloads 
• Lateral movement simulations (via red team) were blocked by policy 

Don’t Assume You Have Coverage 

Cloud provider firewalls don’t inspect DNS or track workload identity across accounts. 

EDRs don’t monitor inter-container traffic or east-west API calls. 

SIEMs collect logs, but they don’t block threats in real time. 

You need: 

• A control plane that spans cloud platforms 
• A data plane that enforces policies close to the user and workload 

Cisco delivers both. Proactive aligns it to your architecture. 

Numbers You Can Act On 

According to the 2023 State of Cloud Security by Palo Alto Networks, 80% of organizations experienced at least one cloud security incident in the past year. Of these, 76% were linked to misconfigured or overly permissive access. 

And Cisco’s 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index found that only 3% of Indian enterprises are classified as mature in cloud-native security controls. 

What Makes Proactive Different 

We’ve deployed Secure Workload and Umbrella for enterprises in sectors like BFSI, healthcare, and tech across Hyderabad, Delhi NCR, and Chennai. 

We don’t just apply default policies. We baseline behaviour, simulate failure paths, run Zero Trust readiness assessments, and align to your compliance needs. We build for long-term operability, not short-term deployment. 

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