Why is it important to protect East-West traffic within a private cloud?

The correct answer is A. All traffic contains threats, so enterprises must protect against threats across the entire network. East-West traffic refers to lateral traffic between workloads within a data center or private cloud. The reason to protect it is not that it inherently carries more threats or uses a less secure protocol - it's that all network traffic can carry threats. Once an attacker or…

Submitted by the_admin· Apr 18, 2026Cloud Security

Question

Options

AAll traffic contains threats, so enterprises must protect against threats across the entire network
BEast-West traffic contains more session-oriented traffic than other traffic
CEast-West traffic contains more threats than other traffic
DEast-West traffic uses IPv6 which is less secure than IPv4

How the community answered

(36 responses)

A
89% (32)
B
3% (1)
C
3% (1)
D
6% (2)

Explanation

East-West traffic refers to lateral traffic between workloads within a data center or private cloud. The reason to protect it is not that it inherently carries more threats or uses a less secure protocol - it's that all network traffic can carry threats. Once an attacker or malware breaches the perimeter, unprotected East-West paths allow lateral movement across the entire environment. Perimeter-only (North-South) inspection leaves internal traffic completely blind to security controls.

Topics

#East-West traffic#Cloud security#Lateral movement#Network segmentation

Community Discussion

No community discussion yet for this question.

Full PCCET Practice