Does Microsegmentation Help a Hybrid Cloud Environment?
Micro-segmentation is becoming more mainstream. Why? Because traditional network segmentation alone cannot adequately secure sensitive internal assets in enterprises of all sizes. Microsegmentation and zero trust security addresses lateral (east-west) traffic that might not be visible to your security team, as opposed to north-south (cross-perimeter) traffic.
Instead of automatically “trusting” significant areas of the network, it enables you to apply distinct, granular access controls to apps, workloads, and other assets within data centers and cloud environments.
The dissolution of the traditional network perimeter, network virtualization, the rising popularity of hybrid cloud environments. Alongside, the enormous rise in the number of workers using personal devices and SaaS applications, and of course, the ongoing escalation of cyberthreats are all driving forces behind the adoption of micro-segmentation. Another essential component of a zero trust architecture is micro-segmentation.
What obstacles do businesses encounter when Implementing Microsegmentation strategies?
Before starting a micro-segmentation project, it is crucial to get support from the entire organization. This is because there is a natural contradiction between the necessity for strict security and the need to expedite business processes. Since there were no immediate advantages to the company, security teams previously struggled to gain support for the implementation of micro-segmentation.
Today, largely as a result of new requirements for zero trust architectures coming from the U.S. There is a higher sense of urgency inside the federal administration. Gaining complete visibility into everything you need to protect can be quite difficult. In addition to time-consuming once you start segmenting your network. Thankfully, there are automated options available to lessen the strain of manual policy adoption and discovery.
The dynamic nature of hybrid cloud settings makes micro-segmentation advantageous. The absence of pre-established zones, however, can be problematic. Instead, we may employ strategies like tagging to link workloads and other assets to a specific application, like a PCI-compliant app.
Additionally, we can use tags to organize micro-segmentation across cloud and on-premise assets. Identity is a further area of similarity across public clouds and corporate data centers.
What can Microsegmentation do for the Hybrid Cloud?
Microsegmentation can apply consistent security policies across hybrid environments made up of many data centers and cloud service providers. Thus, providing seamless protection for applications that traverse numerous clouds. Isn’t that spectacular? Microsegmentation is definitely the superhero of cloud computing. Organizations that use microsegmentation have substantial advantages. more precisely:
Decreased Attack Surface
Microsegmentation allows for visibility into the entire network environment while not impeding development or innovation. Application developers can incorporate security policy definition early in the development cycle to ensure that no new attack vectors are created. By application deployments or updates. This is especially critical in the fast-paced world of DevOps.
Stronger Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory officers can use microsegmentation to design policies that segregate systems subject to laws from the rest of the infrastructure. Granular control over communications with regulated systems lowers the risk of noncompliance.
Control of Access and Damage Mitigation
Access control is very important in hybrid clouds. Limit user accounts to only the privileges they require and think about mandating two-factor authentication.
Another problem for organizations who use hybrid cloud services is breach containment. establishing many entry and egress points on a network, and DevOps concepts gaining a strong footing in the sector When an assault compromises a resource within a network environment; the intrusion will frequently seek lateral movement from its entrance point to do additional damage.
With micro segmentation techniques in place, activities and processes are analyzed against preset security policies. This allows for real-time responses to any malicious behaviors detected, reducing the severity of an attack.
Moreover, the surface of attacks, which frequently migrate laterally within an infrastructure via attacked nodes, can also be lowered when adopting this granular process level form of security to lessen the level of infiltration.
Conclusion
Micro-segmentation is a component of the shared responsibility security architecture that improves the effectiveness of your security measures. Understanding the shared responsibility security paradigm is critical for successful, secure hybrid cloud and digital transformation initiatives, as well as future public cloud infrastructure growth.
The customer is responsible for the security of virtual servers and containers (as well as code in serverless PaaS). The optimum location for security visibility and control, similar to virtual servers and containers in enterprise data centers, is within the workload itself.
Micro-segmentation as part of that procedure will assist you in maintaining a more secure hybrid cloud environment than simple perimeter security
