CORE SERVICES DETECTION FOR A SEGMENTED NETWORK ENVIRONMENT

A segmentation server updates enforcement of a segmentation policy based on detection of core services. The segmentation server obtains characteristics of workloads and identifies workloads that provide core services using port matching, supervised learning based classification, semi supervised learning based classification, or a combination thereof. The segmentations server applies labels to workloads identified as core service providers indicative of the detection. Rules of the segmentation are distributed to enforcement modules based on the label sets of associated workloads to enable the enforcement modules to enforce the segmentation policy. Detection of core services reduces the likelihood of administrator inadvertently enforcing a policy that blocks essential core services.