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February 5, 2024
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How to Choose the Right Microsegmentation Solution for Your Business?
In today’s world of increasing cyber threats, data breaches, and ransomware attacks like WannaCry and NotPetya, businesses need to implement strong network security defenses. Microsegmentation allows for granular software-defined control over network traffic to stop lateral movement – the tactic attackers use to spread malware and access sensitive data.
This comprehensive blog post provides guidance on how to choose the right microsegmentation solution for your business.
Understand the Key Benefits of Microsegmentation
Microsegmentation divides your network into small, isolated sections that restrict lateral movement between segments. By intelligently segmenting your network, you can:
Stop the spread of ransomware, viruses, and malware lateral movement. Microsegmentation limits their reach to just one segment.
Reduce risk of damaging data breaches by securely isolating sensitive information like customer data, IP, and financial records.
Achieve regulatory compliance more easily through network partitioning required by standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX.
Enable secure use of multi-cloud services by consistent segmentation across on-prem and cloud.
Get deep end-to-end visibility into all connections and communications between applications, servers, endpoints, containers, and more across the extended network fabric.
With microsegmentation, you gain significant protection by restricting communication flows between segments. This drastically reduces your attack surface and limits damage from breaches by preventing lateral traversal.
Key Criteria for Evaluating Microsegmentation Solutions
Businesses who wants to implement a good defence system cannot ignore microsegmentation solutions. And choosing the right microsegmentation solution could be game changer in implementing zero trust model. We listed a few key criterias that would help your business to choose the right microsegmentation solution suits your business.
1. Comprehensive Visibility and Dependency Mapping
The microsegmentation solution should provide complete visibility into all assets, connections, and communications across your entire on-premises, cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment.
It should automatically create a detailed visual map of dependencies and relationships between applications, servers, endpoints, containers, and infrastructure. This accurate real-time visualization and understanding of your extended network fabric is crucial for planning effective segmentation.
2. Agnostic Platform Support
Choose a solution that operates seamlessly across diverse hybrid environments – on-premises, multiple public clouds like AWS and Azure, private cloud, virtual machines, containers, and more.
Avoid microsegmentation limited to protecting just a single platform. Platform-agnostic microsegmentation enables consistent granular security and governance everywhere.
3. Simple and Flexible Policy Management
The microsegmentation solution should make it easy for anyone on your team to understand and manage policy creation through an intuitive interface.
It should provide smart defaults and suggestions while allowing you to fully customize rules as needed for your unique environment and use cases. Complex difficult policy creation leads to increased risk through misconfigurations.
4. Layer 7 Application-Level Controls
Microsegmentation leveraging deep packet inspection up to Layer 7 is essential to prevent under-segmentation and exposure through unauthorized ports and protocols.
Layer 7 controls examine application-layer data to intelligently allow or block traffic based on processes, applications, protocols, endpoints, users, and other contextual signals. Layer 4 and network topology focused segmentation can miss risky lateral movement.
5. Integrated Threat Detection and Response
The microsegmentation solution should actively detect policy violations and security anomalies in real-time and alert your team for investigation.
Integrating advanced threat detection and response capabilities enables microsegmentation to automatically identify and isolate intruders and malware – reducing risk through quick threat containment.
6. Continuous Adaptive Segmentation
Choose microsegmentation that adapts policies automatically based on ongoing changes observed in your environment and workflows.
As business needs evolve, workloads shift across cloud, and new assets come online, continuous adaptive segmentation ensures policies remain accurately aligned.
7. Seamless Infrastructure Integrations
Built-in integrations with directories, identity services, cloud platforms, SIEMs, firewalls, and other infrastructure allow microsegmentation to work smoothly within your existing environment.
Avoid solutions that require changing processes or force you to rip and replace infrastructure.
8. Native Zero Trust Architecture
Microsegmentation complements and enforces zero trust frameworks that verify all requests and do not assume trust based on network location. This provides an additional layer of protection.
Key Takeaways
Microsegmentation limits lateral movement used in most cyber attacks.
Choose a solution with strong visibility, Layer 7 controls, automation, and seamless integration.
Take a phased approach focusing on critical systems first.
Detection and response capabilities strengthen microsegmentation.
Conclusion
Implementing the right microsegmentation solution tailored to your unique environment provides very significant protection against modern advanced cyber threats.
Evaluate solutions against the comprehensive criteria listed here to maximize security and operational efficiency.
Carefully phased deployment centered around priority assets also leads to successful microsegmentation adoption with minimal disruption.
Protect your critical business systems and sensitive data by intelligently segmenting your network based on software-defined application communication policies.
We hope this article helped choose the right microsegmentation solution for your businessy. Thanks for reading this post. Please share this post and help secure the digital world. Visit our website, thesecmaster.com, and our social media page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Telegram, Tumblr, Medium, and Instagram and subscribe to receive updates like this.
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Arun KL
Arun KL is a cybersecurity professional with 15+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, cloud security, vulnerability management, Penetration Testing, security operations, and incident response. He is adept at designing and implementing robust security solutions to safeguard systems and data. Arun holds multiple industry certifications including CCNA, CCNA Security, RHCE, CEH, and AWS Security.
