One of the core design principles of the Nutanix Cloud Platform is simplicity. We collapsed the storage and compute stack with HCI, and with Nutanix Flow Network Security (FNS), we did the same for network security. We took the complexity of hardware firewalls and embedded microsegmentation directly into the AHV hypervisor, managed by the single pane of glass that is Prism Central.
However, even with the simplest enforcement tool in the world, the operational challenge of Day 0 remains: Visibility.
To build a Zero Trust security policy, you need to know your traffic. Customers pause their security journeys because they lack an up-to-date map of their application dependencies.
Faddom is an application discovery platform that discovers business applications and maps application dependencies in your environment. Nutanix Flow Network Security integration with Faddom leverages Nutanix APIs to remove the friction of discovery, allowing you to operationalize Nutanix Flow Network Security faster than ever before. This is where the power of the Nutanix API-first architecture comes into play. Nutanix built Prism Central not just as a User Interface (UI), but as an API platform that allows specialized partners like Faddom to integrate with our stack.
The Power of Nutanix Flow Network Security
Before diving into the integration, it is vital to remember why Nutanix Flow Network Security (FNS) is unique.
- FNS provides Microsegmentation solution to protect East-West traffic in your environment.
- FNS is a Distributed Stateful Firewall that runs on every AHV node once enabled.
- FNS is native to Nutanix hypervisor AHV. This means it is agentless
- FNS provides application centric policy management where the FNS policies are decoupled from underlying networking constructs(IP addresses or VLANs or VPCs). FNS policies can be created with application centric categories (e.g., AppType:Application, AppTier:Web, Env:Prod)
While our customers love the advantages that Flow Network Security has to offer, they need help with discovery and visibility of traffic. For eg: Customers want a way to automatically determine which VMs belong to the “Web Tier” category and exactly which ports the “Database Tier” needs to expose.
Extending the Platform: The Faddom Integration
Faddom, an application discovery platform, has built an integration that can be used to create Flow Network Security policies from the Faddom interface.
Here is how the integration works:
- Seamless Ingestion: Faddom maps your infrastructure (without agents), but instead of keeping that data locked in a separate tool, it leverages the Nutanix APIs to push that intelligence into your environment.
- Automated Categorization: The integration takes the discovered application groups and automatically creates the corresponding Nutanix Categories in Prism Central.
- Policy Generation: Most importantly, it translates observed traffic flows into Flow Network Security Policies. It constructs the rules—defining precisely which Categories are allowed to communicate—and pushes them to Prism Central.
From “Monitor” to “Enforce” in Record Time
The beauty of this workflow is that it respects the native safeguards we built into Flow Network Security.
When the integration pushes a policy to Nutanix, it doesn’t just turn the lights out. It creates the policy in Monitor Mode within Prism Central. This allows the Nutanix admin to log into Prism, review the traffic using our native flow visualisation, and validate the rules against the “ground truth” of the infrastructure.
Once validated, the admin simply toggles the switch to Enforce.
Why This Matters for Customers
This integration is proof of the flexibility of the Nutanix Cloud Platform. By providing a rich set of APIs, we allow our customers to choose the best tools for discovery while keeping Nutanix Flow Network Security as the single source of truth for security enforcement (Microsegmentation).
This partnership allows you to:
- Maximize your ROI on AHV: Get full value out of the integrated hypervisor security you already own.
- Reduce OpEx: Apply microsegmentation across hundreds of VMs in minutes, not months.
- Maximise the functionality of Faddom
Security shouldn’t be a bottleneck; it should be an integrated part of your infrastructure. With Nutanix Flow and our growing ecosystem of partners like Faddom, we are making the autonomous, secure data center a reality.
Heading to Nutanix .NEXT Chicago (April 7–9, 2026)? Visit the Faddom booth to experience how real-time, agentless application dependency mapping delivers a trusted single source of truth for IT, Security, and Cloud teams operating complex hybrid environments.
