Aviatrix Blog 
In today’s enterprise cloud, security teams are losing ground. The attack surface is expanding across clouds, SaaS, and hybrid infrastructure—faster than traditional tools can adapt. Native controls are inconsistent. Policy enforcement is fragmented. And with the rise of self-service and decentralized cloud operations, security is often left reacting to risks it didn’t create.
Meanwhile, networking teams are expected to deliver global performance, high availability, and integration with everything—from on-prem to partners to mid-mile providers. But they’re doing it with tools that weren’t designed for the scale or complexity of modern cloud.
Aviatrix was built to solve both challenges. Our unified control plane brings advanced networking and security together—giving cloud architects, security engineers, and platform teams the visibility, policy control, and operational agility they need to move faster, defend better, and eliminate the blind spots that put the business at risk.
With our latest release, we’re taking a major step forward—because in the cloud, what you don’t see can hurt you, and what you can’t control will eventually break.
Upleveling Egress Security with TLS SNI Verification
Outbound traffic often hides the greatest threats. It’s also one of the hardest parts of cloud to control. Allow lists and filtering help, but attackers know how to bypass them—often by spoofing trusted destinations in encrypted sessions.
TLS SNI Verification changes that. Aviatrix‘s Cloud Firewall now verifies outbound TLS traffic at the certificate level, validating both the SNI and the server’s certificate.
- Validates outbound TLS sessions using trusted cert authorities
- Prevents spoofed traffic from escaping through legitimate channels
- Seamlessly integrates with WebGroups and egress policies
Why it’s a breakthrough
This feature provides a vital layer of defense against advanced persistent threats (APTs) and insider risks without agents or complex workarounds. If you’re not inspecting outbound TLS traffic, you’re leaving the door open.
- The Security Challenge: Egress traffic remains one of the most abused—and least inspected—threat vectors in cloud. Attackers often leverage encrypted outbound connections to exfiltrate data or establish command-and-control channels. Traditional allow lists and web filters can’t verify whether traffic is actually headed where it claims to be. That leaves cloud networks vulnerable to spoofed destinations hidden inside trusted-looking TLS sessions.
- The Aviatrix Solution: TLS SNI Verification inspects outbound TLS traffic at the certificate level. By terminating the TCP session, Aviatrix checks that the SNI is valid and that the server’s certificate matches the intended destination. This blocks malicious traffic that attempts to spoof or hijack allowed destinations.
- The Result: A critical blind spot is closed—without agents, latency penalties, or false positives. Security teams gain true Zero Trust egress enforcement, while networking teams retain control over performance and operations. If you’re not validating outbound TLS traffic at the cert level, you’re exposed.
Introducing Rulesets: Scalable Policy Without Bottlenecks
Cloud security policies are sprawling out of control—and it’s no accident. As organizations modernize applications, adopt self-service platforms, and expand into SaaS, third-party clouds, and edge environments, security teams are being outpaced. Each new toolset, each new team, and each new cloud brings its own set of rules and configurations. Meanwhile, developers demand autonomy, and the business can’t afford to wait. The result? Fragmented policy enforcement, shadow access, and growing blind spots that security teams can’t easily close.
Aviatrix Rulesets are designed to fix this. They bring order to policy chaos with a hierarchical model that balances centralized control with safe delegation. Security teams can define guardrails, segment environments, and apply global controls—while giving application and platform teams the power to manage local policies in their own domain.
- Define global segmentation and control from the top
- Allow application teams to manage scoped, local rules
- Autogenerate rules for threat intelligence, geo-blocking, and discovery
Here’s the impact
Security stays centralized where it matters, but the burden is shared. This speeds up policy updates, reduces bottlenecks, and makes life easier for everyone—from the security architects to the app devs.
- The Operational Problem: As cloud adoption accelerates, security policy management becomes a bottleneck. Centralized teams can’t keep up with every segmentation rule or application nuance. On the flip side, giving app teams full access to policy control can create risk and inconsistency. This tension leads to delays, misconfigurations, or—worse—shadow networking.
- How Aviatrix Helps: Rulesets enable centralized teams to define high-level segmentation and threat policies, while securely delegating scoped rule creation to application or platform teams. Aviatrix even auto-generates rules based on threat intelligence and geo-blocking without disrupting custom logic.
- What It Means for You: Security becomes collaborative, not controlling. Development teams can move fast within a safe framework. And operations regain velocity without compromising standards or increasing overhead. You’re no longer stuck choosing between agility and control—you get both.
Extending Enterprise-Grade Connectivity Across the Hybrid Edge
As enterprises expand across cloud, SaaS, on-prem, and partner environments, the network perimeter becomes increasingly dynamic—and more fragile. Extending secure, reliable connectivity beyond the cloud often requires stitching together tools that don’t scale, don’t integrate, and don’t keep up. The result? Gaps in visibility, inconsistent policy enforcement, and fragile architectures that can’t keep up with business demands.
The Aviatrix Transit Edge enhancements solve this by enabling high-performance, BGP-based connectivity using IPSec and GRE—without sacrificing control or consistency. Whether connecting to SD-WAN sites, aggregation hubs like Equinix and Megaport, or traditional datacenters, your external connections can now be as seamless and secure as your cloud core.
- Connect to SD-WANs, partner networks, and on-prem via standard protocols
- Deploy as appliances or virtual services at Equinix and Megaport
- Apply consistent policy and routing controls at every edge
Why you should care
Hybrid is here to stay. And if your edge strategy relies on duct tape or disconnected vendors, you’re already behind. Aviatrix helps unify external connectivity with the same controls you expect inside the cloud.
- The Networking Reality: Hybrid architectures are here to stay—but they often come at the cost of inconsistent routing, poor visibility, and fragmented security controls. Connecting to SD-WANs, partner environments, or datacenters often means bolting on disconnected solutions that don’t scale or standardize.
- The Aviatrix Upgrade: With support for BGP over IPSec and GRE on Transit Edge, Aviatrix makes external connectivity first-class. You can now land dynamic BGP connections at Aviatrix Edge locations in Equinix, Megaport, or customer-owned aggregation sites using standard protocols—with full control and visibility.
- Why It Matters: You simplify and unify how traffic enters and exits the cloud—without giving up control. Partner connections, remote locations, and third-party networks can now adhere to the same operational and security standards as internal infrastructure.
Turning Routing into a Security and Operations Advantage with BGP Communities
In complex multicloud environments, static routing isn’t enough. As traffic flows across clouds, regions, and partner connections, teams need more than just reachability—they need intent. Yet native controls don’t offer the flexibility to guide traffic through the right paths for performance, inspection, or containment.
That’s where enhanced BGP (border gateway protocol) community support from Aviatrix comes in. By allowing teams to tag, propagate, and modify routing behaviors dynamically, Aviatrix gives network and security teams the power to influence how traffic moves—with precision.
- Tag, propagate, or rewrite communities across cloud and hybrid connections
- Define per-gateway or per-link behavior
- Steer traffic through security zones, regions, or compliance boundaries
What this makes possible
With native routing controls, you’re limited to a one-size-fits-all model. BGP communities flip the model—giving you the tools to shape routing behavior based on context, security posture, or performance needs. It’s about building a more responsive, adaptable network from the ground up.
- The Operational Gap: Traffic engineering in multicloud environments is notoriously complex. Native cloud routing lacks fine-grained control, making it hard to apply intent, isolate traffic, or guide flows through inspection points. That’s a big risk during incidents—or during compliance audits.
- Aviatrix’s Approach: BGP community enhancements let you define, propagate, and manipulate routing behavior with precision. Tag traffic from specific sources, prioritize regional paths, or redirect flows through policy inspection—all using well-understood BGP constructs.
- The Business Impact: This brings real intent-based routing to the cloud. You can isolate workloads, contain threats, and simplify multi-region design without introducing new infrastructure. It’s a powerful network-level control that security teams can also use to dynamically contain or reroute suspicious traffic.
Eliminating Downtime Blind Spots with BFD
When a link fails in the cloud, every second counts. Whether it’s a physical fiber cut or a transient issue in your provider’s backbone, slow failover can break applications, disrupt access, or worse—create a security gap where traffic goes uninspected. Native BGP timers weren’t built for this level of agility, and in dynamic, distributed networks, waiting 30+ seconds to converge is simply too long.
Aviatrix now supports Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) across all external BGP connections—single-hop or multi-hop—allowing you to detect path failures in milliseconds and reroute traffic almost instantly.
- Enable single or multi-hop BFD on Aviatrix gateways
- Minimize convergence delays across clouds and sites
- Keep critical applications and secure paths always available
Why this matters in the real world
Failures happen. The question is how quickly your network can detect and adapt. With traditional BGP timers, link disruptions can go unnoticed for too long—jeopardizing both uptime and traffic inspection. BFD brings that detection time down to milliseconds, giving your infrastructure the reflexes it needs to stay ahead of disruption.
- What’s at Stake: Every second of downtime in a secure path creates risk. Whether caused by a fiber cut, upstream issue, or cloud provider fault, traditional BGP hold timers are simply too slow to react. Failovers take too long, creating gaps in both performance and protection.
- The Aviatrix Capability: Aviatrix now supports BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection) on all external BGP connections—single or multi-hop. BFD detects path failures in milliseconds, allowing for nearly instant route convergence and traffic rerouting.
- Why It’s Critical: Fast failover isn’t a luxury—it’s a requirement for secure, cloud-first operations. With BFD, you maintain high availability for critical applications and inspection paths, reducing the risk of user disruption or unmonitored traffic flow during outages.
Enhancing Edge Availability with ActiveMesh BGP for LAN
As enterprise architectures expand to colocation hubs, datacenters, and edge compute sites, one thing becomes clear: the edge is no longer optional. But with that shift comes new risk—connectivity can be fragile, policies can drift, and outages at the edge can create outsized consequences. Traditional edge routing architectures often lack high availability and leave security enforcement spotty or inconsistent.
With the latest Aviatrix release, ActiveMesh BGP peering now extends to LAN neighbors at edge locations. Whether it’s Equinix, a mid-mile provider, or a remote datacenter, you can establish resilient, redundant BGP peerings from your Edge gateways to on-prem routers.
- Peers with on-prem routers via BGP in HA or single-node configs
- Enhances availability for branch, datacenter, and mid-mile locations
- Maintains security policy and routing continuity at the edge
Why it deserves attention
Edge locations are often where performance issues or security blind spots emerge. This feature keeps those locations fully connected and protected—without extra complexity.
- The Common Problem: Edge locations like branches, datacenters, or cloud on-ramps often get less architectural attention—leading to fragile peerings, single points of failure, or inconsistent policy enforcement. This undermines both performance and protection.
- What’s New from Aviatrix: ActiveMesh BGP peering now extends to LAN neighbors at edge sites. You can configure high-availability peerings from Edge gateways to LAN routers, ensuring redundant, resilient communication from edge to core.
- The Outcome: Network architects get the HA and routing resiliency they need. Security teams maintain consistent enforcement across all sites. And operations teams avoid downtime and drift—even at the edge.
Final Thoughts
The latest Aviatrix release represents a shift in how you operate. It’s about eliminating the guesswork, reducing the risk, and giving the teams who run the cloud what they’ve always needed: control without compromise. Most tools weren’t built for the world you’re operating in. With this release, you finally get one that is.
Whether you’re responsible for routing tables or risk assessments, this release has something for you. And if your current tools aren’t keeping up, you’re not alone. Most aren’t.
Take Action
- Request a Free Network Security Assessment – Get a clear view of your posture, risks, and blind spots
- Talk to Our Experts – See how these capabilities map to your environment
- Explore the Aviatrix Platform – Learn how unified cloud networking and security accelerate modernization
Don’t wait until complexity turns into cost—or a misconfiguration becomes a breach.