Issues dealing with security can be severely damaging to a business. Companies often use various strategies to deal with such issues before they can harm the company. To secure data and protect vital information, companies incorporate network strategies that help them stay protected at all times. One of these strategies is “Micro-segmentation.” Let’s go into detail about what is micro-segmentation.
It is an emerging security practice that provides organizations with fine-grained, workload-based security and allows control over communication flows within their environment. Administrators limit network traffic using micro-segmentation to dictate security policies based on the principle of the least privilege and Zero Trust architecture.
Micro-Segmentation reduces the attack surface for the intruders and secures the data center and cloud environments from a security breach. It is deployed on the network layer, the third layer of the OSI (open system interconnection) model. It was mainly developed to improve network performance, controlling east-west traffic to restrict lateral movement.
Micro-segmentation supports increasing cloud adoption, including multi-cloud environments and container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and integrations with DevOps CI/CD pipeline. It also protects applications distributed across hybrid cloud environments.
Organizations implementing Micro-segmentation
Micro-segmentation is implemented across all verticals (business verticals or vertical markets are those firms that cater to one discrete industry and all its customers from top to bottom), such as Financial, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Energy, and Retail Services. Organizations with strict compliance requirements like PCI and SWIFT have also implemented this.
Why Micro-segmentation strategy?
Micro-segmentation prevents intruders from moving within the environment, even if the attacker is inside the data center or cloud. They can no longer move freely because micro-segmentation restricts all unauthorized communications.
Cybersecurity experts have realized that a “perimeter only” approach to security is not enough to stop intruders. It was clear that micro-segmentation is the foundation of data center and cloud security as it is more dynamic and granular.
How to create a Micro-segmentation strategy
Cybersecurity risks are increasing rapidly daily. Secured network technologies like Micro-segmentation and Zero trust security are used to overcome these threats and risks.
5-step strategy to build Micro-segmentation
1. Identify the High Priority Assets
The first step is to determine which assets are worth having maximum security. These could be important applications, databases, and systems. Identifying high-priority assets allows one to focus on where the security efforts should be more inclined. These assets should be supported by fine-grained segmentation to ensure maximum security for these kinds of assets. This could be effectively managed with highly detailed access control.
2. Navigate connections end-to-end and assess vulnerability data
This step involves mapping and navigating the entire connection structure between remote connections, environments, workloads, and applications. Assessing the entire connection leads to data vulnerability scans. This will help to detect loopholes and assess the parts of the connections that are most vulnerable to any potential data breach. Once the most identified part is exposed, it is easy to deploy segmentation accordingly.
3. Deploy the right types of Segmentation
Depending on the required security needs, there are different types of segmentation strategies. It is important to use a suitable variant. The different types of segmentation include:
- Vulnerability-based Segmentation: This type of segmentation gives great importance to real-time vulnerability assessment and management. This type reduces the speed of a security breach by reducing the exposure of vulnerable data.
- Application-based Segmentation: This segmentation separates applications into individual security segments. The most valuable applications are separated into high-security segments that give them the highest importance and monitoring.
- User-based Segmentation: This establishes maximum security for users logging into a particular workload. Workload segmentation allows the user to access only the authorized servers to ensure more security.
- Location-based Segmentation: This separates each security segment with a data center or cloud database location. This can be very useful if there are locations in multiple countries, and for each location, maximum security is required for each segment. Data centers or other locations with sensitive data and information could be used with highly secure segments.
The above options are used to implement a micro-segmentation strategy based on security in terms of location, environment, user, application, and vulnerability.
4. Framing segmentation strategy as per operational security needs
To carry out this step, identify the areas of the operational environment. Assessment is carried out, and it identifies that high security is required for fine-grained segmentation, and low-level security is required for coarse-grained segmentation.
This will help assess the exposed areas of the operating environment that require a lot of attention. After that, timelines can be set to decide which segmentation is needed for high-risk and low-risk operational environments.
5. Try and Deploy
Once the strategy to deploy the segmentation is clear, it is tried and tested. This ensures everything is perfectly aligned. As this process may change the functioning of the areas, the alignment with the functions should be managed perfectly.
For example, deploying location-based segmentation to a specific data center is important to ensure that the security segmentation is fully compatible with the operational functions of the data center. This enables it not to have any impact on operational functioning, and at the same time, it will have maximum segmented security.
Common Micro-segmentation Obstacles
A few common micro-segmentation obstacles have been mentioned below
- Hybrid Environments
- Lack of visibility
- Policy complexity
- DevOps and Auto-scaling
- Unproven methodology
Conclusion
The process and implementation of micro-segmentation have many benefits for the system and environment. It helps to gain extensive control over locations, environment, data, users, and all other areas of the organizational structure. Various organizations have started implementing micro-segmentation across their environments. There is a five-step strategy to build micro-segmentation that includes identifying the high-priority assets, navigating connections end-to-end and assessing vulnerability data, deploying the right type of segmentation, framing the segmentation strategy as per operational needs, and in the end, testing and deployment take place.
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