Breaking Down Microsegmentation

In Entara’s third webinar, Breaking Down Microsegmentation, Entara’s Director of Professional Services Michael Brunetti and Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Aaron Chandler discussed how to implement Microsegmentation into your business. The webinar broke down what microsegmentation is as well as its benefits.  

What is Microsegmentation?

Microsegmentation is a network security technique that divides a network into isolated segments so businesses can visualize, monitor, and control traffic. This strategy reduces the attack surface and prevents unauthorized access, securing applications by allowing only specific traffic. Microsegmentation allows for far greater control over who can access resources and is the foundation for a Zero Trust security model.

The security technique divides a network into isolated segments so businesses can visualize, monitor, and control traffic. Check out the recording below to learn more.  

Why should businesses implement Microsegmentation?  

1. Stronger traffic control: Microsegmentation controls movement within network perimeters in ways that other security strategies cannot. With this solution, security professionals can assign privileges and police the resources available to specific networks, systems, applications, or users, overall tightening security.

2. Breach containment: When microsegmentation is in place, cyber attackers cannot access the full internal network through a single weak endpoint. With proper segmentation and permissions in place, east-west traffic is contained within a network and it is much more difficult for a threat actor to hop from endpoint to endpoint and reach sensitive data or gain further permissions.  

3. Smaller attack surface: With having isolated network segments and more precise access control across those segments, threat actors’ lateral network movements are constrained. Therefore, microsegmentation reduces the threat surface, which limits the damage caused by cyber attacks.

4. Flexibility: With microsegmentation, a company can allow authorized access only to internal systems or applications that the user needs to be successful in their role. For example, a customized policy could be created that does not allow any user outside of the finance department access to the company’s bookkeeping system.

5. Regulatory compliance: Any businesses that process credit cards, participate in stock trading, or are engaged in transactions for the accounts of others face strict regulatory compliance standards, including those by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). These regulations may, for example, require all network traffic to be segmented and kept independent of any network traffic that happens when payments are being processed, which microsegmentation supports.  

What are the benefits of Microsegmentation?

1. Advanced Threat Protection:  

Microsegmentation elevates security protections and prevents data exfiltration. It also speeds up the response and remediation process during a cybersecurity incident, like ransomware, so that companies can reduce impact.  

2. Helps maintain regulatory compliance:

Microsegmentation offers granular control of communications with regulated systems. It also helps companies meet and audit compliance standards.  

3. Simplified Policy Management:  

Microsegmentation makes it possible to intuitively create granular security policy templates that dictate user and system access to:

• Networks
• Workstations
• Servers
• Applications
• Databases

It also reduces complexity and network re-architecture to meet segmentation requirements, including compliance and internal policies, and allows for granular control over policy management.  

4. Increased visibility  

Microsegmentation allows for more visibility into self-documenting application port and protocol usage. It also provides a more in-depth view of traffic, all in one location and strengthens the level of security by discovering unknown assets.  

5. Secure Application Access

Microsegmentation limits network access to applications based on port and protocols determined by AI and admin policy creation. Security teams can create flexible policy controls that adapt to user identities and roles. This also protects users as they access company data across multiple devices.  

Check out the full recording and follow us on social media to be the first to know when registration opens for our next webinar!  

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