What Is Cloud Enclaving?

Why Is Cloud Enclaving Essential for Modern Security?

Cloud enclaving isolates sensitive resources into secure zones to improve security and limit the blast radius of breaches. This provides structure to protect workloads and data from advanced cyberattacks, and can work alongside tools like microsegmentation to add workload-level control within zones.

Cloud enclaving enables:

• Proactive security: Policies within cloud enclaves protect workloads with zero trust controls that limit breaches to a single asset, not the entire environment. Many tools use automation to identify communication paths and recommend policies, making protection easier to manage.
• Reduced risk: Instead of relying on static IP-based controls, enclaves use identity-based protections at the workload level to keep security consistent across dynamic environments. This ensures workloads are secure wherever they are deployed.
• Simpler policies: Cloud enclaving uses scalable, identity-based policies that apply at the zone and workload levels. Unlike traditional methods tied to IP addresses or hardware, these policies adapt automatically to changes in your infrastructure.

Combining enclave isolation with microsegmentation reduces attack surfaces and strengthens security for workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments.

What Is an Enclave?

An enclave is a portion of a network that’s separated from the rest of the network and governed by granular security policies. The purpose of a secure enclave is to enforce least-privileged access to critical resources as part of a defense-in-depth security strategy.

How Does Cloud Enclaving Differ from Traditional Cybersecurity?

Traditional perimeter-based security worked when data and apps resided in on-premises data centers, and employees worked on-site. But with the rise of hybrid work and cloud adoption, this model is now outdated. Modern organizations often use multiple cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure), giving attackers multiple entry points to exploit as data moves across environments.

Cloud enclaving solves this by dividing cloud environments into secure zones with strict controls, limiting the risk of lateral movement. Tailored zero trust policies—often enforced with tools like microsegmentation—restrict traffic to only what is explicitly allowed. This approach is a more effective way to protect workloads and data in today’s decentralized, cloud native environments.

Network Segmentation vs. Cloud Enclaving

Network segmentation handles traffic within and between subnets at the network level, using VLANs, firewalls, and access lists. Cloud enclaving, on the other hand, adds layered, granular identity-based and contextual controls, securing traffic at the workload or application level. Let's examine both approaches in more detail.

Network Segmentation

Network segmentation divides a network into subnets, applying security and compliance rules to each. Traffic between segments is usually separated by VLANs and firewalls. While more detailed than perimeter-based security, segmentation relies on static IP addresses, ports, and protocols, which identify where requests came from but not who or what made the requests.

These static controls trust entities inside segments, even if they’re malicious actors. This “flat” network design allows lateral movement, leaving attackers pathways to spread across workloads and compromise your environment. Managing segmentation with legacy tools like firewalls and virtual machines (VMs) also comes with high costs, complexity, and time requirements, often outweighing its benefits.

Cloud Enclaving

Cloud enclaving creates isolated zones in cloud environments, tailored to sensitive workloads, apps, or compliance needs. Unlike network segmentation, enclaving uses tools like microsegmentation to reduce attack surfaces by controlling east-west traffic at the workload level. Enclaving also authenticates requests based on identity and context, adding deeper security beyond static IP controls.

With least-privileged access and limited lateral movement within zones, enclaving reduces risks from insider and external threats. Even if one workload is breached, the rest of the environment stays secure.

Is Cloud Enclaving a Best Practice?

Cloud enclaving is a key solution for modern security challenges that traditional methods cannot meet. It creates secure zones for critical resources, while tools like microsegmentation ensure workload-level protection by limiting traffic to what’s explicitly allowed. Enclaving helps reduce attack surfaces and strengthens defenses across hybrid and multicloud environments.

• Visibility for hybrid and multicloud environments: Cloud enclaves provide context-aware, identity-based controls, enabling your team to define security policies based on applications, compliance, or environment needs. This boosts visibility, improves security posture, and makes it easier to detect and respond to threats.
• Consistent security across providers: Microsegmentation ensures workloads stay protected across cloud providers, giving you the flexibility to deploy containers, serverless computing, or hybrid setups while applying uniform security policies.
• Cost savings with reduced complexity: Enclaving reduces management time and resources by replacing outdated, address-based rules with simpler, scalable policies. Its automation capabilities help reduce labor-intensive tasks while improving security efficiency.

How Zscaler Secures Cloud Workloads

Zscaler Zero Trust Cloud delivers simplified, consistent security for modern workloads across multicloud environments. Built on zero trust principles, it secures all workload traffic—whether ingress, egress, or east-west flows—with a unified approach that eliminates lateral movement and reduces the attack surface.

With granular microsegmentation and AI-powered policy recommendations, Zscaler protects mission-critical applications, simplifies management, and speeds up deployment. Flexible deployment options let you manage the infrastructure yourself or use the solution as a gateway service.

Zero Trust Cloud unifies multicloud security in one solution, providing:

• Comprehensive traffic security: Protect east-west, ingress, egress, and micro-flows with consistent controls.
• Peerless risk reduction: Stop lateral movement of threats and isolate high-risk workloads with segmentation.
• Reduced admin complexity: Simplify management with automated policy creation and AI-powered recommendations.