Best Microsegmentation Solutions

When beginning the process of moving to a microsegmentation solution, it is important to be vigilant and painstakingly thorough to ensure that nothing is missed in the process and to avoid any avoidable issues.

1. Know your traffic - Microsegmentation is complete transparency of ALL traffic flow - north-south and east-west. You will need to work with your IT team and perhaps look at third-party solutions to get a complete understanding of the current appropriate ongoing communication and active productive connections between workloads. This will facilitate the identification of unnecessary connections which need to be closed.

1. Identify your segments - Next, you will want to identify your segments. The most common ones are function, location, class, security threat, and distinction. These identifiers will help with regulating communication flows throughout your workflows. These identifiers or tags will help when adding third-party solutions and scalability. They will also play a big part with increased security options as you make changes to your plan.

1. Establish concise security protocols - You will want to identify the level of threat risk that is unique to your organization and the microsegmentation attributes you have created. These protocols should be extremely thorough and address every type of communication flow and every device with access to your network and how they will all relate to each other. You will want to take a deep dive into your entire ecosystem to ensure every workflow has been considered. The zero-trust concept must be applied and all traffic must be identified, categorized, and verified to securely reduce the chance of any threat to your organization. Within the zero-trust concept, any unknowns must be denied access and considered a potential threat risk.

1. Scalability is a must - Organizations are growing and changing - sometimes, daily. You need to create the option to make adjustments and adapt to changes as your organization changes. Complete workflow transparency allows for immediate identification of changes in workflow and complete awareness of any changes to the threat surface. You will want your system to be able to identify new workloads and auto-tag them with known identifiers.

1. Implement your plan - Start slow. You want to roll out your plan slowly and with solid communication to all members of your project team, (security, tech, architect, etc). It’s best to start small, test your plan, gain feedback, test again, then add new workloads to your rollout plan. During every step in your rollout process, you want to ensure protocols are workable and being followed consistently. If any problems develop, it is important to address them immediately and make the necessary adjustments to your plan, communicate the changes to the team, and continue to the next segment based on your set priorities. Once the entire rollout is complete, continue to regularly follow up to make certain all protocols are being satisfied and everything is working according to plan.

Microsegmentation Software enhances network security by creating granular, isolation segments within your network to control traffic flows. It allows you to define security policies at the workload level, minimizing the attack surface by preventing lateral movement of threats. This approach helps you quickly contain and mitigate security incidents, improving your overall security posture.

Deploying Microsegmentation Software can be challenging due to the complexity of modern IT environments. You need a thorough understanding of your network applications and infrastructure to accurately define segmentation policies. Integration with existing security tools and IT processes is crucial, as is gaining stakeholder alignment and ensuring minimal disruption to operations during the transition.

Microsegmentation Software can assist with compliance requirements by allowing you to implement fine-grained security controls and visibility that align with regulatory frameworks. By segmenting resources and applying specific controls to sensitive data and systems, you can demonstrate better compliance with standards such as PCI-DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA, giving you a robust audit trail.

When choosing Microsegmentation Software, look for key features such as centralized policy management, integration capabilities with existing infrastructure, real-time visibility and analytics, scalability to adapt to network changes, and support for multi-cloud environments. These features ensure effective implementation and management, providing the flexibility and insight needed for secure operations.

Measuring the effectiveness of Microsegmentation Software involves assessing several factors. These include the reduction of security incidents, improved detection and response times, compliance adherence levels, and user satisfaction. Performance metrics, like the number of microsegments successfully implemented and the coverage of critical assets, also provide insights into its effectiveness.