What Is Security Segmentation and How Can Businesses Benefit from?
Segmentation is an already used approach since we have begun connection networks. It had previously begun with Firewalls which was a part of networking. However, networking is designed to transmit data, not to work on filtering them. Therefore, using the network to segment data is extremely complex.
As everyone knows, security threats are being on the rise and constantly evolving, so using the traditional security approaches will not help. In other words, to safeguard your organization against an advanced attacker, perimeter defense like Firewalls and multi-factor authentication won’t suffice.
To delve more, network segmentation is to break larger networks or environments into smaller portions. There are diverse methodologies to perform network segmentation. As we said, some businesses depend on the network itself, some others deploy hardware firewall appliances, but the latest approach that proved efficient to defend against malicious intruders is to enforce network segmentation on the host workload itself in a way that keeps the network untouched.
What Is Security Segmentation?
To be clear, let’s assume that a security breach occurred within your network; how would you stop them? Actually, nothing will stand up to the intruders within the network unless there are internal barriers that can seize control over the malicious intruders.
This is exactly the way security segmentation works. In the modern IT environment, the network stops attackers or threats from spreading through or moving laterally in data centers or cloud environments. Thereby, the threats or malicious actors get contained in the network compartment or, precisely, the host segment, so that they cannot get into other parts of the environment. This will better protect your organization.
Additionally, there are multiple ways of network segmentation. Among them is network segmentation that relies on VLANs or subnets using IP addresses. Also, there is Firewall segmentation where firewalls get deployed inside the network to formulate internal zones and partition functional areas from each other to restrain attack surfaces.
Further, there is segmentation with SDN that relies on greater network segmentation and programmability through centralized controllers.
Security Micro-Segmentation
Micro-segmentation is a kind of segmentation enforced using the host workloads contrary to subnets or firewalls. The approach utilizes whitelist models that obstructs all traffic excluding just permitted. It utilizes workload telemetry to create a map of cloud and on-premises compute environments. The map helps visualize the data that needs to be protected and, further, formulate an automated policy for segmentation.
What is more distinctive is that this approach can implement segmentation up to the process level, with different levels of granularity. The granular approach helps organizations build fences to guarantee authentic access and data flows across the organization applications. Additionally, it identifies and sets rules governing key workloads, applications, and servers.
Micro-Segmentation Benefits with Illumio
Micro-segmentation is a major pillar of zero-trust security and is considered one of the most powerful techniques that protect against breaches.
Acquire Real-Time Visibility into Application Behavior and Connections
Gaining visibility into the application layer illuminates the demeanor of applications, workloads, and flows to predict risk areas and create effective strategy of addressing the threats. To explain, micro-segmentation maps out the application dependency to provide real-time visibility based on Illumination, a real-time application dependency map.
Accelerate Breach Containment
Thanks to micro-segmentation, organizations can create micro-perimeters surrounding particular assets. These micro-perimeters help decouple the attack surface to deliver granular control needed for breach containment.
Get Critical Applications and Assets Secured and Trusted
With micro-segmentation, you can orchestrate communications between applications, hypervisors, or containers, whether on-premises or in the public, private, or hybrid clouds. In the meantime, Illumio allows organizations to apply and test policies first to ensure that implementing segmentation will not break applications or impact workloads.
Stimulate Policy Management
Illumio enables organizations to dissociate segmentation from the underlying network to define policies on the basis of the language that IT uses. Illumio’s labels are readable by humans to make policy creation easier than the traditional approaches of network segmentation such as VLANs and SDNs.
Strengthen Your Organization’s Compliance Posture
Applying Illumio’s micro-segmentation will enable you to meet compliance requirements that include PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX with no need to re-architect your network. Therefore, you will easily segment and separate protected systems and encrypt communications across applications.
Mitigate Your Software Vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities are usually a source of risk for companies. For this reason, Illumio integrates companies’ applications and software with a third-party vulnerability scan to help identify the potential pathways of malicious actors.
The Bottom Line
All network segmentation approaches do not suffice due to the legacy methodologies they implement. Micro-segmentation currently plays a crucial role in achieving zero-trust security. Illumio delivers micro-segmentation that is based on granular approaches to build fences down to the application level and guarantee appropriate access and risk mitigation.
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