Check Point and Illumio have expanded their partnership to defend against a new category of threat: frontier AI models capable of launching full-scale cyberattacks at machine speed.

The expanded collaboration combines Check Point‘s perimeter defence with Illumio‘s breach containment technology, aiming to close the gap that attackers exploit once they get past the network edge. The companies said adversaries can now compress an entire attack lifecycle — discovery, exploitation and lateral movement — into a single automated sequence with little or no human involvement, collapsing the window defenders have to react.

Closing the gap between prevention and containment

Under the expanded partnership, joint customers can now procure Illumio directly through Check Point, simplifying vendor consolidation and accelerating deployment. The integration builds on a 2025 tie-up with Illumio Insights and extends to Illumio Segmentation, letting security teams align Check Point firewall policy with Illumio’s workload model across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The aim is to reduce unnecessary connectivity and make it harder for attackers to move undetected through a network once inside.

“Security teams are being asked to defend environments that are moving faster and that are more complex — against attackers who are using AI to do in minutes what used to take weeks,” said Paul Barbosa, VP of Cloud and SASE at Check Point.

Microsegmentation demand is rising across APAC

The expanded partnership lands as research firm IDC forecasts microsegmentation to grow at a 23.5 per cent compound annual growth rate, with 96 per cent of buyers reporting a noticeable improvement in security posture, cyber resiliency and ransomware preparedness after adoption. IDC also found that 98.3 per cent of microsegmentation buyers prefer solutions tightly integrated with SASE, firewall or other zero-trust technologies — a gap the Check Point-Illumio combination is designed to close.

Andrew Rubin, CEO and founder of Illumio, said AI is compressing the time between intrusion and impact, fundamentally changing the calculus for defenders. The expanded integration is available now for joint Check Point and Illumio customers, with technical integration guidance published in a joint white paper.

The move reflects a broader shift in enterprise security spending as organisations adopt AI across their own operations while simultaneously defending against AI-powered adversaries. Check Point said the unified architecture is designed to give customers a coordinated defence that works on both sides of the perimeter, with Illumio addressing what happens inside the network once a breach occurs.