What is Microsegmentation?
Microsegmentation is a security method of managing network access between workloads. With micro segmentations, administrators can limit traffic based on the principle of least privilege and zero trust to improve regulatory compliance. Organizations use this technique for both reduce attack surface as well strengthen containment during breaches
The input clearly states that “Micro- segments or ‘microsec’ for short are parts within an enterprise which have been specifically tailored by its designers so they don’t leak information about company practices.
Challenges in Microsegmentation
Segmenting your network into smaller segments can have performance and security benefits. With the ever-changing nature of cyberattacks, it is more important than ever to leverage network segmentation for security purposes. Oftentimes this requires rearchitecting or reconfiguring your VLANs and subnets which can be difficult if they don’t match up with what’s required by a particular Segmentation Needed policy–or even worse yet: trying figure out how ALL these different networks interact without any guidance whatsoever.
How does micro segmentation work?
Microsegmentation is a way to limit the damage that hackers can cause by isolating their networks. And focusing on only those areas where they know there’s no risk. Using this approach, security teams don’t need re-architecting existing systems; rather it allows them get ahead of any potential threats as soon as possible with minimal disruption
Micro segmentations controls fall into three categories:
- Agent-based solutions use software agents on the workload and enforce granular isolation to individual hosts or containers. These may leverage built in host-based firewalls, but more often they rely upon identifying specific traits about each job for its own protection from interference by other processes running simultaneously within a single system chip boundary.
- The network infrastructure is leveraged to enforce policy. This means that physical and virtual devices such as load balancers or switches can be used for segmentation purposes in order dictate. What information flows through them at any given time based on your needs.
- Native cloud controls for your security needs! You can use them with any service that has an embedded capability, like Amazon’s Security Group or Azure Firewalls.
Microsegmentation is a powerful tool that helps provide consistent security across private and public clouds alike by virtue of three key principles: visibility, granular control over access rights to sensitive information on an individual level as well as dynamic adaptation.
In order to deliver the most effective visibility into all network traffic
A microsegmentation solution should be able monitor both inside and across data centers as well. This can best done by seeing what’s happening with an application or orchestrator instead of just looking at IP addresses and ports alone- this way you’ll know when something changes that may affect your end users.
With granular security, network administrators can strengthen and pinpoint the location of threats by creating specific policies for critical applications. The goal is to prevent lateral movement with these sophisticated guidelines that precisely control traffic in or out from a workload such as weekly payroll runs or updates to human resource databases
The key feature about this type protection is its ability not only inspect what’s coming through. But also where it’s going once processed; so even if you get hit today.
Benefits of Microsegmentation:
- Microsegmentation provides visibility into the complete network environment without slowing development or innovation. Application developers can integrate security policy definition early in the cycle. And ensure that neither application deployments nor updates create new attack vectors, which is important for fast-moving DevOps environments.
- Microsegmentation solutions allow you to create different security policies for each type of application, automatically applying them without user intervention. This can streamline your entire IT infrastructure by simplifying policy management. And reducing manual efforts – all while providing a higher level assurance that employees are protected wherever they go at work.
- When regulatory officers use micro segmentation. They can create policies that isolate systems subject to regulations from the rest of an infrastructure’s software. This reduces risk by controlling communications with these types if devices so noncompliant usage doesn’t occur or get unnoticed too easily.