Micro-Segmentation & its benefits

There has been a drastic increase in cyber-attacks in the last few years post-Covid. The sudden increase in remote work and more lax security protections at home gave hacker groups the perfect opportunity to breach sensitive data.

There are multiple security initiatives that companies are taking to protect their intellectual property. Zero Trust and Micro-segmentation are a few advanced initiatives helping organizations protect their data.?

What is Micro-segmentation?

Micro-Segmentation is a method of creating highly secure zones in data centers and cloud environments to isolate workloads from one another and secure them individually. Organizations use micro-segmentation to reduce the network attack surface, improve breaches, strengthen regulatory compliance, and secure their environment.

By implementing micro-segmentation, an organization can eliminate unintentional and undesirable data flows between different workloads. This provides a higher level of control over the organizational environment and reduces the risk of significant impacts.?

One of the biggest challenges security professionals face is visibility across all network communications – primarily east-west or server-to-server traffic, which constitutes over 75% of the traffic. However, real-time traffic visibility ensures that no connection goes unmonitored with software-defined micro-segmentation. As a result, security teams can visualize every single line of communication between any two assets – be it on-premise or the cloud. Furthermore, the detection time is drastically reduced as visibility becomes more granular.

How does Micro-segmentation Work?

Micro-segmentation helps provide consistent security across data centers and hybrid clouds. Unlike north-south communications, east-west traffic is usually not subject to firewall inspection and is, for all practical purposes, invisible to the network security team. To be effective, micro-segmentation requires visibility into all network traffic. While there are several ways to monitor traffic, the hypervisor touches every packet on the network and is uniquely positioned to provide the necessary visibility.

While no security solution can claim 100% breach protection, micro-segmentation provides security professionals with the tools needed to detect and prevent cyber threats much faster than before.?

Benefits of Micro-segmentation!

Organizations that adopt micro-segmentation realize tangible benefits in a reduced attack surface, improved breach containment, more assertive compliance posture, and streamlined policy management. More specifically:

1. Reduced Attack Surface:?Micro-segmentation provides visibility into the complete network environment without slowing development or innovation. Application developers can integrate security policy definition early in the development cycle and ensure that neither application deployments nor updates create new attack vectors.?
2. Improved Breach Containment:?Micro-segmentation gives security teams the ability to monitor network traffic against predefined policies and shorten the time to respond to and remediate breaches.
3. Restricted Lateral Movement:?Micro-segmentation makes it more difficult for an attacker to move from one compromised workload to another. This decreases the impact of an attack upon the organization and the risk of a data breach.
4. More Robust Regulatory Compliance:?Using micro-segmentation, regulatory officers can create policies that isolate systems subject to regulations from the rest of the infrastructure.?
5. Streamlined Policy Management:?Moving to a micro-segmentation architecture provides an opportunity to simplify the management of firewall policies. An emerging best practice is to use a single consolidated policy for subnet access control and threat detection and mitigation. This helps in increasing security.
6. Improved Operational Efficiency:?Micro-segmentation is implemented in software, eliminating the need for individual firewall appliances and access control lists.