A Data Center Security Revolution

Table of Contents

A Data Center Security Revolution

The network perimeter you once relied on is gone. Rigid, castle-and-moat defenses could only protect monolithic applications when all users, servers, and data sat neatly behind a hardened wall. Today’s hybrid clouds, containers & microservices shatter that model: traffic flows freely between virtual machines, pods, and cloud instances, and attackers exploit any unmonitored channel to roam undetected. In this environment, “never trust, always verify”,  the mantra of Zero Trust, becomes non-negotiable. But without pervasive visibility into every packet hop, especially East-West communications inside the data center, you can’t authenticate or authorize traffic reliably.
Arista’s DANZ Monitoring Fabric (DMF) fills this gap. It builds a software-defined, scale-out visibility layer that captures 100% of traffic (North-South and East-West), then optimizes, filters, and delivers that traffic to your security and monitoring tools. When combined with Arista Awake Network Detection and Response (NDR), you gain an AI-driven defense that turns raw packet data into real-time threat detection and on-demand forensics. This integrated fabric is the foundation you need to extend Zero Trust deep into your data center and hybrid cloud.

Zero Trust Imperative: From “Trust but Verify” to “Never Trust, Always Verify”

Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) reframes security as a continuous process of verification rather than a one-time assumption of trust. NIST SP 800-207 codifies this approach around five core principles:

All Data Sources & Services Are Resources

Every device, application, container or data store, even in public clouds, counts as a resource boundary. Each must be individually authenticated and authorized before any interaction is allowed.

Secure All Communications

No connection is free from scrutiny. Encryption, mutual authentication and integrity checks apply equally to traffic within your VLANs as to traffic crossing the Internet.

Per-Session, Least-Privilege Access

Permissions are issued on a per-session basis, granting only the exact privileges needed and revoking them when the session ends.

Dynamic Policy Evaluation

A Policy Engine ingests real-time context—user identity, device health, application posture, location and sensitivity—then renders access decisions on the fly.

Continuous Asset Posture Assessment

Devices and workloads constantly report their security posture. Any deviation from policy triggers re-authentication or quarantine.

These tenets dismantle the illusion of an implicitly trusted internal network. Yet none can be enforced without full visibility into packet flows. If you can’t “see” the communication request, you cannot verify its origin, inspect its attributes or apply a dynamic policy.

The East-West Blind Spot: Lateral Movement’s Superhighway

Modern applications are rarely monolithic. They spin up dozens (sometimes hundreds) of microservices, each communicating in real time. That lateral, or East-West, traffic now represents 70–80 percent of data center volume, far eclipsing traditional North-South flows. Yet East-West communications often bypass perimeter defenses entirely.

Why attackers love East-West corridors:

Reconnaissance: Once inside, adversaries map servers, containers and Kubernetes nodes.

Privilege Escalation: They exploit misconfigurations or harvest credentials via Pass-the-Hash or living-off-the-land tools.

Lateral Movement: With legitimate protocols (SMB, RDP, SSH), they hop to more systems until valuable targets; databases, domain controllers, etc. are reached.

Without packet-level visibility, this movement blends with routine traffic. Traditional SPAN ports and simplistic taps introduce blind spots through dropped packets, timing distortion, and oversubscription. Worse, manual SPAN configurations are error-prone and don’t scale. The result: you monitor the perimeter but remain blind to the attacker’s internal journey.

Architecting Pervasive Visibility with Arista DANZ Monitoring Fabric

Arista DMF reimagines network monitoring as a flexible, software-defined fabric rather than fixed, chassis-based boxes. It delivers pervasive visibility, intelligent packet services, and seamless integration from a single control plane.

DMF Core Components

DMF Controller (HA Appliances or VM):

Centralized SDN brain: defines policies, automates provisioning, exposes a REST API and GUI for one-click deployment across the entire fabric.

Scale-Out Fabric of Merchant-Silicon Switches

Out-of-band deployment using commodity hardware: supports 1 Gb to 400 Gb ports, zero-touch provisioning, and non-disruptive expansion as monitoring needs grow

Service Nodes (x86 Appliances)

Perform line-rate packet deduplication, slicing, masking, and NetFlow/IPFIX generation. Offload heavy processing from core switches and security tools.

Analytics & Recorder Nodes

Analytics Nodes feed enriched metadata into SIEM, NDR, and APM systems. Recorder Nodes provide high-performance, full-packet capture (PCAP) with index-based retrieval for on-demand forensics.

Why Legacy SPAN Ports Fail

Relying on SPAN ports for visibility carries four fatal flaws:

Packet Dropping Under Load: Mirroring is low-priority; congested switches drop critical packets.

Oversubscription: Aggregating multiple source ports into one SPAN link forces discards.

Altered Timing: SPAN distorts timestamps and omits erroneous frames, hiding anomalies.

Operational Complexity: Manual, per-switch config is error-prone and doesn’t scale

DMF bypasses these issues by passively tapping every link and leveraging an SDN-controlled fabric to deliver 100 percent of traffic—unaltered and complete—to your tools.

Cloud & Container Extensions

Public Cloud Ingestion: Support for AWS VPC Traffic Mirroring and Azure Virtual TAP extends DMF visibility into native cloud environments.

Kubernetes & Service Mesh: Integrated with CNI and service-mesh telemetry, DMF correlates packet flows with pod labels and application metadata for microservices-level situational awareness

Arista CloudVision Integration: Manage DMF alongside your Arista switches and routers in a single multi-domain controller, enabling unified policy and telemetry across on-prem and cloud.

Intelligent Traffic Optimization: Maximizing Tool ROI

Raw packet capture at scale overwhelms even the most capable tool farms. DMF’s Service Nodes refine that stream before it ever hits your security appliances, delivering a compounding ROI:

First-order ROI comes from reduced license costs: ingest less data, pay less for volume-based licensing. Second-order gains appear as higher analyst productivity: fewer alerts, faster triage and shorter MTTR. Third-order benefits accrue through risk mitigation: early detection and containment shrink the blast radius of inevitable breaches.

From Passive Visibility to Active Defense: Arista DANZ Forensic Exchange (DFX)

Capturing packets is only step one. True Zero Trust security demands turning data into action. DANZ Forensic Exchange (DFX) unites DMF with Arista Awake NDR for a closed-loop workflow:

Global Data Collection

DMF fabric ingests every packet—on-prem and cloud—using TAPs, SPANs or native mirror APIs.

Policy-Driven Optimization

The DMF Controller applies centrally defined filters, deduplication, slicing and masking via Service Nodes.

AI-Powered Analysis

Awake’s AVA™ engine models attacker Tactics, Techniques & Procedures (TTPs) and EntityIQ™ builds a security knowledge graph that profiles every user, device and application.

Automated Response & Forensics

High-fidelity alerts include context such as the exact packet flow and associated metadata. If a deeper investigation is needed, Awake calls the DMF Recorder Node to retrieve the full PCAP, rewinding your network to the moment of compromise for packet-level forensics.

This seamless integration eliminates manual handoffs, accelerates investigations and enforces continuous policy verification—hallmarks of a mature Zero Trust posture.

Business Impact: Security as a Strategic Enabler

Transforming Security from Cost Center to Growth Driver

Reduced MTTR

 ZK Research reports that 85 percent of incident resolution time is spent simply locating relevant data. With DMF and Awake, organizations cut that time from days to minutes, freeing engineering teams for proactive innovation.

Lower OPEX

 Automated policy deployment and REST-API orchestration eliminate manual SPAN configs, reducing human error and operational overhead.

Improved Analyst Efficiency

 High-confidence alerts and contextual insights slash false positives, lifting the burden of alert fatigue and dramatically improving SOC morale and retention.

Accelerated Digital Transformation

 With per-workload security assurances, IT teams confidently adopt cloud services, containers and DevOps pipelines—knowing every packet, every session, is visible and verifiable.

A Unified Fabric for a Zero Trust Future

Zero Trust is not an optional upgrade; it’s the only viable model for today’s distributed, hybrid-cloud data centers. Yet its core tenets—continuous verification, least privilege, and micro-segmentation are impossible without complete packet-level visibility. Arista’s DANZ Monitoring Fabric provides that foundation, capturing every byte of North-South and East-West traffic at scale. Service Nodes then optimize and secure that data stream, maximizing tool ROI and enforcing compliance by design. When combined with Arista Awake NDR, you transform passive visibility into an active, AI-driven defense—automating threat detection, enriching alerts with context, and enabling on-demand forensics.

Together, DMF and Awake form a unified security fabric that extends Zero Trust from concept to operational reality, empowering your organization to innovate without compromise and stay ahead of evolving threats in the modern data center and beyond.