The Complete Guide to Microsegmentation and Why it’s Essential for Businesses Today

What is Microsegmentation?

Microsegmentation is a new term that is coming to the forefront in the cyber security industry. The term comes from the world of marketing and it refers to segmentation of customers into micro-segments based on their unique needs. The idea is to create more personalized marketing messages that appeal to each segment’s unique interests.

In the world of cyber security, microsegmentation is the same idea, but instead of marketing, we are talking about security. We often talk about segmenting your network, but microsegmentation takes segmentation to the next level. It is taking a critical look at your network and identifying all your network devices, endpoints, and users, then creating unique policies and controls for each of those unique assets. Microsegmentation is a proactive approach to security and one of the best ways to protect your network from breaches.

How Microsegmentation Works?

Microsegmentation, also referred to as Zero Trust or identity-based segmentation, delivers on segmentation requirements without the need to re-architect. Security teams can isolate workloads in a network in order to limit the effect of malicious lateral movement. Microsegmentation controls can be assimilated into three categories:

• Agent-based solutions use a software agent on the workload and enforce granular isolation to individual hosts and containers. Agent-based solutions may leverage the built-in host-based firewall or derive isolation abilities based on workload identity or attributes.  
• Network-based segmentation controls rely on the network infrastructure. This style leverages physical and virtual devices, such as load-balancers, switches, software-defined networks (SDN), and overlay networks to enforce policy. 
• Native cloud controls leverage capabilities embedded in the cloud service provider (e.g., Amazon security group, Azure firewall, or Google Cloud firewall).

Microsegmentation helps provide consistent security across private and public clouds alike by virtue of three key principles: visibility, granular security and dynamic adaptation. .The visibility principle refers to the ability to monitor and report on security events across usage profiles and users. With the help of a cloud-based distributed observation system, cloud admins can detect threats in real time.

Different Types of Microsegmentation:

Microsegmentation is an approach to segmenting a content audience into several distinct groups.

• Application Segmentation:This type of microsegmentation ring-fences applications to protect sensitive communication. This includes controlling traffic between applications (whether they run on containerized workloads, hypervisors, or bare metal) in proprietary data centers and public or hybrid cloud environments.
• User Segmentation : User segmentation limits application visibility to members of specified groups, using identity services like Microsoft Active Directory.
• Environmental Segmentation : In a traditional network, assets are dynamically placed throughout the development, staging, testing, and production environments, and across public or hybrid clouds, making it difficult to control and protect them.

How does microsegmentation help businesses?

Micro segmentation is a process that helps businesses to identify specific customers and target them accordingly. When you are micro segmenting, you are taking into consideration the demographic information of your customers as well as the characteristics of their purchase behaviour, behavior patterns, and purchase intent. Even though segmentation is crucial in business as it helps you to target specific customers with the right kind of services and products, it is important that you know what your ideal customer profile is before you begin micro segmentation.

Microsegmentation is a technique that helps businesses segment their customers into different groups and target these groups with different marketing and sales strategies. It helps businesses to understand their customers better and to target them with the right messages at the right time.

What are the Benefits of Microsegmentation?

Microsegmentation is the process of segmenting a set of users into smaller groups. This helps to increase the effectiveness of search engines, which in turn helps to increase the number of visitors.

• Simplified policy management: Moving to a microsegmented network or Zero Trust security model provides an opportunity to simplify policy management.
• Reduced attack surface: Microsegmentation provides visibility into the complete network environment without slowing development or innovation. Application developers can integrate security policy definition early in the development cycle and ensure that neither application deployments nor updates create new attack vectors.
• Improved breach containment: Microsegmentation gives security teams the ability to monitor network traffic against predefined policies as well as shorten the time to respond to and remediate data breaches.
• Stronger regulatory compliance: Using microsegmentation, regulatory officers can create policies that isolate systems subject to regulations from the rest of the infrastructure. Granular control of communications with regulated systems reduces the risk of noncompliant usage.