Zero Trust and Microsegmentation are high-interest topics in the world of cybersecurity. Currently, numerous alternative frameworks are materializing to guide the discussion. This Quick Guide is designed to identify the key components of Zero Trust and Microsegmentation, enabling cybersecurity leaders to understand integration with cybersecurity planning.  

What is Zero Trust in Cybersecurity?

Zero Trust is the philosophy of viewing all users and assets of a network as equally viable risks for network breaches. Zero Trust is frequently associated with Identity Management solutions, yet spans much further, spanning an integrated ecosystem of solutions that view all user activities through the lens of caution, delivering contextually-aware responsive solutions to concurrently enable the business and mitigate risk.

Key Zero Trust Attributes

Session-Based Verification: Every new session, even within pre-approved access for a particular user, requires new verification, regardless of the user or source. Going beyond identify management, sessions are monitored continuously, with real-time policy checks and validation methods as activities cross data and platform connection points.

Verify Least Privilege Access: Users and devices are granted only the minimum necessary access to perform their functions. Instead of on/off access provisioning, Zero Trust covers delivery of advanced capabilities including just-in-time access and just-enough access rights.

Continuous Assumption of Breach: Zero Trust operates with the assumption of immediate risks to an environment, encompassing solutions such as data encryption, workload abnormality detection, regular testing, and the segmentation of network resources, to better contain lateral attacks. This is where microsegmentation enters the frame, as a Zero Trust method of designing a network architecture to contain breaches.

Success Benchmarks: Zero Trust success is measured by efficacy in addressing access violations, and whether current business policies and needs are aligned to Zero Trust parameters.

Key Challenges: Lack of proper planning for Zero Trust can have a notable impact on business performance, user experience, and rule-integration timeframes.

What is Microsegmentation Cybersecurity?

Microsegmentation is a targeted strategy that divides a network into smaller, isolated segments to create granular security controls for specific IT resources, down to the workload level. Segmentation, autonomous monitoring, and remediation are responsive network architecture capabilities, designed to understand intent, and ‘contain’ cyber-attackers to the specific environment - thereby limiting the efficacy and scope of breaches through faster response.

Take a look at our reviews of the top microsegmentation vendors around.

Microsegmentation Attributes

Reduced Attack Surface: Fewer systems are exposed to unnecessary access, particularly to external connection points, minimizing the risk of exploitation.

Segmentation: Network traffic is segmented and monitored to limit lateral movement. If a system is compromised, the attacker's ability to spread within the network is curtailed.

Implementation Location: Microsegmentation is frequently embedded within network and workload management systems, but also requires integration with network controls, firewalls, and policy engines.

Success Benchmarks: Microsegmentation success is measured by efficacy in segmentation - attaining both operational efficiency and contained risks, assessing policy violation effectiveness, and accuracy in containment actions without inadvertent consequence.

Key Challenges: Implementing complex policies, incident response change management, and performance impacts, such as latency.

Integration with a Comprehensive Cybersecurity Strategy

While Zero Trust and Microsegmentation are powerful tools, it's important to recognize that successful integration with cybersecurity strategy is still required. Failure to properly integrate the technology ecosystem, policy and process requirements, and handling of organizational impacts can lead to conflicting policies, business operations inefficiencies, and IT access requests - creating compounding secondary challenges with mixed results for risk identification and containment.

Initial Planning Considerations For Integrating Zero Trust, Microsegmentation, and Cybersecurity Policy:

• Understand enhancement opportunities or conflicts with policies guiding users, data and sessions as well as Asset Protection policies.

• Explore the quality design of intelligent policy application, factoring in verification (including location and activity behavior), contextual elements, and existing security control capabilities to design context-based decisions, not just automated policy decisions and enforcement.

• Define change management plan for enhanced reporting from continuous monitoring, understanding of new behavior analytics and automation capabilities, mapping traffic behavior to segmentation risk-containment strategies, and understanding data classification and encryption.

• Define coordinated reporting between IT, and third-party cybersecurity providers to provide a comprehensive view of risks, response, accurate policy interpretation and action, traffic controls efficacy, and cross-segment handling strategies from latency to multi-environment containment responses.

• Define a change management plan for scaled responses for cyber-risk governance, including training and policy deployment.

Therefore, it's crucial to combine microsegmentation with other security measures, such as:

• Endpoint Security: Implementing strong endpoint protection solutions to safeguard devices from malware and other threats.

• Network Security: Deploying firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) to protect network perimeters.

• Identity and Access Management (IAM): Enforcing strong identity and access controls to limit unauthorized access to resources.

• User Awareness and Training: Educating users about security best practices to minimize the risk of human error.

• Regular Security Assessments and Penetration Testing: Conducting regular security assessments and penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses.  

By adopting a layered security approach and combining microsegmentation with other security controls, organizations can significantly enhance their overall security posture and reduce the risk of cyberattacks.

How Hypershift Can Help Your Organization with Microsegmentation & Zero Trust

From identifying and containing risks, supporting rapid adaptation to evolving regulatory standards, and creating a safer data-handling environment, Zero Trust and Microsegmentation have moved to the foundations of Cybersecurity strategy.

Successful integration with cybersecurity strategy begins with effective planning, spanning business strategy, operations, and technology. As a trusted advisor to hundreds of companies in solving their most complex technology and cyber issues, we welcome the opportunity to help you organize your strategic discussions, co-facilitate microsegmentation exploration workshops, and bring our advising capabilities to the table to optimize planning in any stage of the security journey.

For further reading, check out our other Microsegmentation content:

Microsegmentation for Financial Institutions

Microsegmentation for Federal Agencies

Microsegmentation in Healthcare