Akamai Secures Critical Infrastructure with NVIDIA-Powered Agentless Zero Trust Segmentation
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and NVIDIA BlueField integration ends the long-standing trade-off between advanced security and system performance for energy, manufacturing, and transportation sectors
Akamai has announced a new solution powered by NVIDIA to protect most vital systems from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. By combining Akamai Guardicore Segmentation software with NVIDIA BlueField Data Processing Units (DPU), the companies are delivering a way to support the full operational technology (OT) and industrial control system (ICS) landscape, including “un-agentable” industrial equipment — the heavy machinery and control systems that power modern society. Organizations can implement this hardware-isolated, “agentless” security approach to help align with strict new regulatory requirements and lower their risk profile for cyber insurance.
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Protecting critical infrastructure has historically been a challenge. Most cybersecurity tools require installing agents — small pieces of software — directly onto a computer. However, as cyberthreats increasingly target mission-critical environments, organizations are seeking better ways to protect critical assets, including the specialized controllers used in water plants, power grids, and factories. Many of these systems are too old or too delicate to run extra software without risking crashes or production slowdown. As a result, organizations have often been forced to leave sensitive infrastructure exposed and vulnerable.
By offloading user-configurable security processes from the host system to the NVIDIA BlueField DPU, the joint solution enables Zero Trust segmentation without requiring software agents on fragile or legacy systems. It delivers deep, out-of-band visibility across systems, networks, and applications without disrupting operations. Security policies can be enforced in real time and are capable of creating a strong protective boundary around critical operational systems. The result is trusted insight into operational activity and improved overall cyber resilience.
In addition to segmentation, the solution can identify anomalous network connections and indicators of compromise. The agentless approach allows organizations to filter threats and isolate compromised systems at the hardware level, mitigating and obstructing threat proliferation even if a facility’s main computer is breached. Because NVIDIA BlueField acts as an independent “bump-in-the-wire” protector, users can lock down sensitive industrial equipment with minimal impact on system performance or operational uptime of the machinery itself.
“Whether you are running a water plant or a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, your priority is keeping the system moving at full speed. You can’t afford to let security software tax your performance,” said Ofer Wolf, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Security at Akamai. “In the past, these environments were extremely difficult to secure because the machines could not handle the overhead of traditional tools without risking a crash or slowing down vital calculations. Akamai and NVIDIA are changing that. By offloading segmentation and observability to the DPU, we’re giving organizations a way to stop attacks in their tracks while maximizing CPU power for the heavy lifting it was meant to do.”
“AI is fundamentally reshaping every business, and as automation scales, safeguarding enterprise data and resources is absolutely critical — but security cannot come at the expense of uptime or resilience,” said Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President, Networking at NVIDIA. “By integrating Akamai’s segmentation capabilities directly into NVIDIA BlueField, organizations can enforce Zero Trust at the infrastructure layer, protecting their most sensitive operations without impacting system stability or production performance.”
This collaboration between Akamai and NVIDIA comes at a crucial time. Recent assessments from the U.S. federal government highlight that energy, and transportation sectors are now primary targets for adversaries looking to cause widespread disruption.
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