A business customer deploys workloads in the public cloud. Now the customer network faces governance issues with the flow of IT traffic and must ensure the security of data and intellectual property.

A VPN tunnel secures traffic in transit between the customer site and the cloud provider but provides no visibility or governance over east-west traffic flows and workload behavior within the cloud environment itself.

IPFIX telemetry from customer routers captures perimeter flows but misses lateral traffic between cloud workloads and provides incomplete visibility into the cloud-internal governance issues driving the problem.

A zone-based firewall on Internet edge devices only inspects north-south traffic crossing the perimeter and cannot observe or enforce governance policies on traffic flowing between workloads inside the public cloud.

Workload policies applied directly in the cloud - such as microsegmentation rules, cloud-native security groups, or frameworks like Cisco Secure Workload - expose which workloads are violating data handling and traffic governance requirements by enforcing and logging policy at the compute layer where intellectual property resides. This approach targets the root of the governance gap rather than observing it indirectly at the network perimeter, enabling teams to identify specific non-compliant workloads and remediate them precisely.