Case Study: Cathay Pacific achieves first‑class microsegmentation and faster PCI compliance with Illumio Core

Cathay Pacific Gains First-Class Microsegmentation with Illumio Core

Cathay Pacific, a top global airline operating 3,000+ servers and roughly 600 applications across on‑premises and multi‑cloud environments, was forced to accelerate its Zero Trust and least‑privilege program after being targeted by an attack. The security team needed microsegmentation to stop lateral movement and protect critical “crown jewel” apps, but existing discovery tools lacked integrated visualization and policy workflow—creating a tight deadline to gain clear application‑level visibility and the ability to act quickly without disrupting services.

Cathay deployed Illumio Core to map real‑time application dependencies across on‑prem, AWS and Azure, use an App Owner View for cross‑team policy review, and run policies in test mode before enforcement. The result was fast time‑to‑value—segmentation completed ahead of schedule—with greater confidence that enforcement wouldn’t break apps, PCI DSS requirements met without installing millions of dollars’ worth of firewalls, and workload‑to‑workload encryption (SecureConnect) deployed on over 1,000 workstations to strengthen data‑in‑motion protection.

Cathay Pacific

YC Chan

Head of Infrastructure Engineering