t&rdquo;. As cluster federation evolves on Kubernetes and other platforms, our intent is for Istio to secure communications across services spanning multiple federated clusters.</p><h2 id=benefits-of-istio-auth>Benefits of Istio Auth</h2><p><strong>Defense in depth</strong>: When used in conjunction with Kubernetes (or infrastructure) network policies, users achieve higher levels of confidence, knowing that pod-to-pod or service-to-service communication is secured both at network and application layers.</p>