East-West Traffic

East-West Traffic refers to data traffic exchanged between systems within an IT infrastructure. This includes communication between servers, virtual machines, containers, databases and applications in data centres or cloud environments. In contrast, North-South Traffic describes communication between internal systems and external networks such as the internet. With the increasing use of cloud computing, virtualisation and microservices, internal network traffic has become significantly more important. Efficient handling of East-West Traffic is therefore essential for the performance and scalability of modern data centres. Monitoring this traffic also plays an important role in network security, as cyberattacks can spread laterally between systems within an infrastructure following an initial compromise.