For most enterprises, the zero trust story of the last five years has been about people—identity, device posture, SSO, and conditional access. But today’s breaches unfold between machines: API-to-API calls, east–west traffic across VPCs/VNets, and egress to third-party services. Regulations and internal mandates now expect auditable proof that these runtime paths are encrypted, segmented, and continuously authorized across every cloud. That is exactly where the new Aviatrix Zero Trust for Workloads (ZTW) product line lands: enforcement inside the live data path, not just at the edge.
Product Overview: Enforcement Where Workloads Actually Run
Aviatrix ZTW operationalizes runtime zero trust for cloud workloads without agents or application rewrites. It deploys inline, identity-aware controls in the cloud network fabric to secure workload-to-workload and workload-to-internet communications across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI. Customers gain uniform policy, visibility, and audit evidence—even as environments span VMs, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless functions.
ZTW is delivered as three tightly integrated offerings that let teams start with visibility and advance to full enforcement:
Workload Attack Path Assessment – a free, agentless diagnostic that reconstructs likely breach chains from your own flow and DNS telemetry, showing where segmentation or egress controls would have stopped attacker movement.
Workload Threat Visibility – persistent, cross-cloud visibility into outbound workload behavior, enriched with domain, geography, and threat context, and designed to reduce native NAT cost/complexity.
Zero Trust for Workloads – inline runtime enforcement that blocks lateral movement and data exfiltration with identity-driven policies and high-performance inspection in every runtime path.
"By combining Workload Attack Path Assessment (free discovery), Workload Threat Visibility (continuous insight), and Zero Trust for Workloads (active enforcement), Aviatrix delivers the runtime foundation for adaptive, agentic systems – enabling secure AI workloads that operate autonomously across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI."
What’s Uniquely Aviatrix
Inline, agentless, and cross-cloud by design. Enforcement points are placed transparently in existing cloud paths—no re-architecture, no host agents—so you can govern Kubernetes, serverless, and traditional compute with one model. Policies follow identity and tags (via SmartGroups), not brittle IPs, and are compiled once then enforced consistently across providers.
From evidence to action—fast. The free Assessment correlates runtime behaviors into Workload Breach Chains, turning scattered detections into an attacker-realistic sequence you can break with precise controls. Findings flow directly into ZTW policies, accelerating time from insight to enforcement.
Audit-ready proof. CoPilot and ZTW generate session-level logs, topology overlays, and compliance mappings aligned to CISA ZTMM 2.0, PCI DSS 4.0, HIPAA 2025, and DORA—evidence boards and regulators can actually use.
Key Benefits that Matter to CISOs and Platform Leaders
Contain lateral movement across clouds. Identity-driven microsegmentation and east–west policy prevent unauthorized workload communication across accounts, regions, and clusters—without service-mesh dependency.
Kill data-exfiltration paths at the source. Inline egress governance (domain/geo awareness, threat prevention, selective NAT) stops risky outbound connections while providing a single, normalized record of what left your cloud.
Prove zero trust maturity with continuous evidence. ZTW maps controls and telemetry to ZTMM 2.0 and other frameworks, creating a defensible audit trail of encryption coverage, per-session authorization, and policy correctness across providers.
Secure AI and agentic workloads. Because enforcement lives in the runtime network, ZTW protects the high-churn traffic of model APIs, feature stores, and autonomous agents—providing guardrails without slowing teams down.
Market Context: Why Runtime Enforcement is Now Table Stakes
Security spending and board scrutiny are rising, but so are expectations for provable zero trust outcomes beyond the perimeter.
Security investment keeps climbing. Gartner projects worldwide end-user spending on information security to reach $213B in 2025, up from $193B in 2024—evidence that boards are funding controls that demonstrate measurable risk reduction. Gartner
Breaches remain costly—especially in the U.S. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach reports a $4.44M global average breach cost. Multiple analyses of the same dataset show the U.S. average at ~$10.22M, underscoring the premium on faster containment and defensible evidence. IBM+1
Regulators emphasize microsegmentation and runtime control. In 2025, CISA published dedicated Zero Trust Microsegmentation Guidance, reinforcing the need to eliminate implicit trust inside the environment—not just at login. CISA
Taken together, the direction is clear: organizations must move from “policies on paper” to runtime enforcement and continuous verification—exactly the operating model ZTW enables.
How Customers Use It
1) Egress governance for cloud workloads. Start by normalizing and enriching outbound connections across AWS and Azure via Workload Threat Visibility. Identify foreign or malicious destinations, prove data-sovereignty boundaries, and lower native NAT spend. Then turn high-risk findings into enforced egress policy with ZTW.
2) East–west segmentation across clusters and accounts. Use SmartGroups to express intent in business terms (app, tier, namespace, sensitivity). ZTW enforces least-privilege across containers, VMs, and serverless, reducing blast radius without brittle IP rules.
3) AI runtime guardrails. Protect model APIs, data services, and agent-to-service traffic by enforcing identity-aware policies and encryption on every call—independent of ephemeral IPs and per-cloud constructs.
4) Evidence-driven program management. Run the Workload Attack Path Assessment to visualize breach chains and prioritize the few controls that break the most likely attacker paths. Use ZTW and CoPilot to show ongoing reduction in reachable paths and encryption coverage in quarterly reviews.
Why this Complements Your Existing Stack
ZTW does not replace identity providers, CNAPPs, or posture tools—it activates them. Posture and identity tell you who should talk; ZTW governs what actually does in real time, with uniform policy across clouds. And because it’s inline and agentless, platform and security teams can adopt it without disrupting developers or redesigning networks.
Getting Started
Most customers begin with a low-friction visibility phase, then phase in enforcement:
Run the free Workload Attack Path Assessment to see how attacker movement would unfold in your environment and where zero trust breaks down today.
Turn on Workload Threat Visibility to create a unified, cross-cloud baseline of outbound behavior and policy gaps—while trimming NAT costs.
Enable Zero Trust for Workloads to enforce micro-perimeters, govern egress, and prove maturity gains with audit-ready evidence mapped to ZTMM 2.0 and other frameworks.
The Bottom Line
Edge-only zero trust is no longer sufficient for AI-driven, cloud native enterprises. You need inline, identity-aware control in the paths where workloads actually communicate—and the evidence to prove it works. Aviatrix Zero Trust for Workloads provides both, with a pragmatic path from discovery to continuous enforcement.
Call to action: Start with the free Workload Attack Path Assessment to visualize your breach chains, then turn insight into enforcement with Workload Threat Visibility and Zero Trust for Workloads. Your teams—and your auditors—will have the proof they need.
Sources for market context: Gartner security spending forecast (2025) and IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025 (global and U.S. averages); CISA Zero Trust Microsegmentation Guidance (2025).
