One of the biggest concerns in cybersecurity is lateral movement. This means attackers can move across multiple systems, eventually reaching high-value assets. While traditional perimeter defenses are necessary, they can easily fall short in stopping this kind of threat. That’s why it’s important to know about the best tools for lateral threat prevention in microsegmentation.
With the help of microsegmentation, companies can mitigate lateral threats through isolation. From isolating specific workloads to applications and devices, micro segmentation security puts different aspects of the network into granular security zones.
Not only does this act as a layered challenge for lateral threats, but it aligns with zero trust network access (ZTNA) principles as well. As you read through this article, you’ll learn about several of the best tools for lateral threat prevention in microsegmentation, and why they’re so important.
What is Microsegmentation Security and Why It Matters
Utilizing microsegmentation security helps to divide networks into granular segments. Moreover, access rules are enforced with reliable precision. This guarantees that only authorized entities can communicate across segments.
Several other important key details about microsegmentation include:
- Segmentation software is identity-driven, making it flexible for cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments
- Works to reduce your potential attack surfaces through enforcing least-privileged access and isolating critical assets
- Breaches are contained much more effectively, limiting the potential for lateral movement and improving network compliance
- Not to be confused with traditional network segmentation tools, which use VLANs, subnets, and hardware firewalls
It may not be the only way to defend against lateral movement, but microsegmentation is a key component to keeping large networks secure. This is a great solution for scaling businesses or those already managing a large enterprise network. Overall, the best tools for lateral threat prevention in microsegmentation come down to a few leading options.
Best Tools for Lateral Threat Prevention in Microsegmentation
The scope of lateral threat prevention goes beyond the help of hardware firewalls. You’re looking for strong workload visibility and scalable segmentation that’ll grow with you. While there are many solutions on the market, some of the most relevant include ZTNA microsegmentation, secure app access, and cloud security.
1. ZTNA Microsegmentation Solutions
Enforcing least privilege access, ZTNA works by verifying identity, context, and device posture with every request. Combine this with microsegmentation, and you get granular boundaries between workloads and apps.
This helps to restrict access to only authorized resources for relevant devices and users. For a little added context, ZTNA is seen as a much more reliable replacement for broad VPN access. Businesses also benefit from pivots between systems if credentials are compromised, which limits lateral movement simultaneously.
2. Leading Microsegmentation Solutions for Secure App Access
With workload isolation, you can restrict unnecessary traffic, preventing attackers from exploiting weak connections. In the scope of secure app access, segmentation controls service-to-service communication. Another way to put this is that it can contain threats within a single app.
On top of that, taking this approach can improve operational performance. This is made possible through mapping dependencies and enforcing privilege rules. It’s just another effective layer to segmentation, while also strengthening compliance and supporting audit-ready visibility.
3. Segmentation Software for Enterprise and Cloud Security
Today’s microsegmentation is software-defined. This includes features like automated policy creation and even ML-based traffic analysis. It’s able to dynamically adapt to multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem infrastructures. Actively utilized across numerous industries reliant on cloud security, microsegmentation does a lot more than just prevent lateral threats.
Here are a few examples:
- Healthcare uses it to isolate medical devices and patient data
- The finance industry makes use of it for securing payment systems and remaining compliant
- Many SaaS providers use segmentation for tenant isolation, ensuring customer data stays separated
Although this strategy is very much in use in today’s world, many companies are still catching up from traditional efforts. While general segmentation still has its place with smaller companies, the same can’t be said for those with much more complex networks.
Let’s Wrap Up
Making use of the best tools for lateral threat prevention in microsegmentation is a must in this day and age. This goes for relevant strategies as well, since it isn’t something you necessarily just set and forget without oversight.
The requirements in effective network security are rapidly changing, and micro segmentation security is a core part of that discussion. For those who’d like to learn more about network segmentation tools, have a chat with our team at Firewalls to find what’s right for you.
