Microsegmentation software is a network security solution used to divide a network or workloads into smaller segments to enhance security. Each segment, or microsegment, is isolated from others and requires separate authentication for access.
Microsegmentation software is useful in helping companies gain a clearer picture of their assets and workloads, enhancing visibility, detection, and remediation efforts. This approach limits the impact of potential breaches, as attackers cannot easily move laterally within the network.
Without microsegmentation, attackers can easily navigate from one asset to another within a compromised network. With microsegmentation, security controls and policies are applied at a granular level, reducing the attack surface and protecting workloads even after a breach.
The importance of microsegmentation lies in its ability to provide granular control over network traffic, allowing organizations to enforce security policies more effectively. By isolating sensitive data and critical systems, microsegmentation helps prevent unauthorized access and data breaches. It also improves network performance by reducing unnecessary traffic and allows for easier detection and containment of threats.
For network security and cybersecurity professionals, microsegmentation software offers several benefits.
It enhances visibility into network traffic, making it easier to monitor and identify potential threats. It also simplifies compliance with regulatory requirements by isolating sensitive data and applications. Additionally, microsegmentation can improve incident response capabilities by limiting the impact of security incidents and providing a more manageable environment for investigation and remediation.
In the past, network security relied heavily on perimeter defenses such as firewalls, which were effective but limited in their ability to protect against advanced threats. Traditional network segmentation was coarse and often based on physical or logical boundaries, making it difficult to enforce granular security policies.
Today, microsegmentation software has emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing network security. It allows organizations to create virtual segments within their network, each with its own security policies and controls. This approach provides greater visibility into network traffic and enables more effective detection and containment of threats.
Modern microsegmentation software is highly automated and integrated with other security tools, allowing for dynamic policy enforcement based on real-time threat intelligence. It has also become more scalable and flexible, making it easier for organizations to adapt to changing network environments and security requirements.
Overall, microsegmentation software has evolved to become a critical component of modern network security strategies.
Best Microsegmentation Software: What To Look For
When choosing the right microsegmentation software for your organization, you should consider several factors, features, and capabilities to ensure you select the best solution for your present and future needs:
- Granularity: Look for software that allows for granular segmentation, enabling you to define security policies at the individual workload level. This ensures that each workload is protected according to its specific security requirements.
- Scalability: Choose software that can scale to accommodate the size and complexity of your network. It should be able to handle a large number of workloads and segments without compromising performance.
- Automation: Automation capabilities are crucial for simplifying the management of microsegmentation policies. Look for software that offers automated policy creation, enforcement, and updates to reduce the burden on IT teams.
- Integration: The software should integrate seamlessly with your existing security infrastructure, including firewalls, IDS/IPS, and SIEM solutions. This ensures that your microsegmentation strategy is part of a comprehensive security ecosystem.
- Visibility: A good microsegmentation solution provides comprehensive visibility into network traffic and security events. This allows you to monitor and analyze traffic patterns to detect anomalies and potential threats.
- Flexibility: Choose software that offers flexibility in defining segmentation policies. It should allow you to easily modify policies as your network evolves and your security requirements change.
- Compliance: Ensure that the software complies with relevant regulatory requirements and industry standards. It should help you achieve and maintain compliance with standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
- Performance: Consider the performance impact of the software on your network. Look for solutions that provide strong security without significantly impacting network performance.
- Support and Documentation: Finally, consider the level of support and documentation offered by the software vendor. Ensure that they provide adequate resources and assistance to help you implement and maintain your microsegmentation strategy effectively.
Best Microsegmentation Software Used By Security Professionals
1. AlgoSec
Near-effortless micro-segmentation with AlgoSec. By utilizing AlgoSec’s micro-segmentation method of network security, businesses can immediately feel safer against possible hackers and potential data breaches. Our application workload security platform will secure your compute instances across any infrastructure and any cloud. It will also enable trusted access through automated, exhaustive context from various systems to automatically adapt security policies. Our team can work with you all the way from strategy to execution to ensure the different micro-segmentation challenges are met and handled with ease.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Jumpstart network segmentation with a clear understanding of your traffic flows and their application ties, using either CSV files, integration with tools like Cisco Tetration, or AlgoSec’s AutoDiscovery for precise traffic mapping.
- With just a basic segmentation into 3-5 zones, you can fortify your network against attacks, lock down sensitive data, and deploy advanced attack isolation strategies. And that’s just the start – further segmentation only creates a more elaborate maze that frustrates attackers!
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: AlgoSec Microsegmentation
2. Zscaler Workload Communications
Zscaler Workload Communications secures workload-to-internet and workload-to-workload connectivity across hybrid cloud environments for your mission-critical workloads and servers with the power of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Zscaler Workload Communications is the modern approach to securing your cloud applications and workloads. With secure zero trust cloud connectivity for workloads, you can eliminate your network attack surface, stop lateral threat movement, avoid workload compromise, and prevent sensitive data loss.
- The Zscaler platform inspects all traffic inline to protect against cyberthreats and data loss, establishes the identity and context of the access request, and applies all appropriate policies before establishing connectivity to the internet, SaaS apps, or private workloads and servers.
- Workloads and servers can access any internet or SaaS destination with a scalable, reliable security solution that inspects all transactions.
- Workloads and servers can securely communicate with other workloads and servers hosted in other cloud regions, public clouds or on-premises data centers—no need for complex bespoke cloud routing.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Zscaler Workload Communications
3. Illumio
Illumio. Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS). Assume breach. Minimize impact. Increase resilience. Unlike prevention and detection technologies, ZTS contains the spread of breaches and ransomware across the hybrid attack surface by continually visualizing how workloads and devices are communicating, creating granular policies that only allow wanted and necessary communication, and automatically isolating breaches by restricting lateral movement proactively or during an active attack. ZTS is a foundational and strategic pillar of any Zero Trust architecture.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Scalable, yet easy to use: Illumio ZTS provides a consistent approach to microsegmentation across the entire hybrid attack surface — from multi-cloud to data center to remote endpoints, from IT to OT. With Illumio ZTS, organizations can quickly and easily see risk, set policy, and stop the spread of breaches.
- See risk: See risk by visualizing all communication and traffic between workloads and devices across the entire hybrid attack surface. For example, which servers are talking to business-critical apps, and which applications have open lines to the internet.
- Set policy: With every change, automatically set granular and flexible segmentation policies that control communication between workloads and devices to only allow what is necessary and wanted. For example, restrict server-to-app communications, dev to prod, or IT to OT.
- Stop the spread: Proactively isolate high-value assets or reactively isolate compromised systems during an active attack to stop the spread of a breach. For example, see how a global law firm instantly isolated a ransomware breach.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation
4. Tufin
Simplify network segmentation complexity. Tufin customers effectively manage segmentation and microsegmentation by leveraging pre-defined templates or constructing their own policy in a zone-to-zone based matrix that is implemented across their network infrastructure. Network segmentation and microsegmentation. Visualize, improve and manage segmentation across fragmented networks. Simplify the complexity.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Improve your network security posture: Identify access violations across physical and cloud in real time and eliminate them or designate them as temporary exceptions.
- Achieve compliance and cut audit efforts: Segment regulated zones to contain audit preparation efforts and ensure compliance with industry and best practices templates.
- Improve network manageability: Operationalize network segmentation across legacy firewalls, next-generation firewalls, SDN, SASE and Edge devices from a central console.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Tufin
5. Zero Networks Segment
Microsegmentation in a matter of minutes. Radically Simple Segmentation in a Click. Stop ransomware by restricting network access to essential assets only – it’s automated, agentless, and MFA-powered. Your network, segmented in just 30 days. Not months or years. No broken applications. No humans involved.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Effortlessly block lateral movement: Zero Networks automates network segmentation by learning network connections and creating accurate policies, which are applied to all host-based firewalls to allow only essential traffic.
- Agentless: Quickest setup and scale with dramatically reduced maintenance
- Automated: All assets are automatically microsegmented – IT & OT, on-prem and in the cloud – without breaking anything
- MFA-Powered: Privileged, sensitive ports are closed and open temporarily once admin authenticates with MFA.
IDEAL FOR:
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Zero Networks Segment
6. ForeScout
Remove complexity from zero trust network segmentation with visualized traffic flows and policy simulation. Flat, under-segmented networks allow threats to propagate and expand the blast radius, increasing risk and exposure. The Forescout Platform accelerates the design, planning and deployment of dynamic network segmentation. Visualize traffic flows to see what should and shouldn’t be communicating and simulate policy changes to avoid gaps and misconfigurations – without causing business disruption.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Visual Traffic Matrix: Facilitate policy design by visualizing traffic flows based on a logical taxonomy of users, applications, services, functions, locations, devices and risk level.
- Simulation: Minimize business disruption by simulating policy changes and flagging violations or contradictions that could have unexpected consequences in production environments.
- Continuous monitoring: Monitor segmentation compliance to identify anomalous communications, validate that controls are working as designed and quickly respond to policy violations.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: ForeScout
7. Cisco Secure Workload (Tetration)
Achieve the security required for today’s heterogeneous multicloud environment with Secure Workload (formerly Tetration). Protect workloads across any cloud, application, and workload–anywhere. Automate and implement a secure zero-trust model for micro-segmentation based on application behavior and telemetry. Proactively detect and remediate indicators of compromise to minimize the impact to your business.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Reduce attack surface: Automate micro-segmentation through customized recommendations based on your environment and applications.
- Remain compliant: Granular visibility and control over application components with automatic detection and enforcement of compliance.
- Gain visibility: Track the security posture of applications across your entire environment. Make informed decisions using automatic NIST vulnerabilities data feed.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Enterprises
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Cisco Secure Workload (Tetration)
8. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Eliminate risk in your network with industry-leading microsegmentation. A better way to achieve Zero Trust segmentation.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Reduce your attack surface: Reduce risk without the need for costly security hardware with a software-based microsegmentation approach.
- Prevent lateral movement: Detect lateral movement and real-time threats across the entire cyberattack kill chain with a single platform.
- Secure critical IT assets: Protect critical assets from ransomware by easily enforcing Zero Trust principles across hybrid cloud ecosystems.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market organizations
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
9. Enclave
Experience the ease and speed of Enclave, a cutting-edge microsegmentation software tailored for seamless Zero Trust integration. Guard against unauthorized lateral movement using pinpoint segmentation, gain clear visuals of your IT activities, and receive immediate network security alerts. Optimized for data centers, multi-cloud landscapes, and endpoints, Enclave deploys quicker than traditional methods, offering unmatched network visibility and control. You can’t protect what you can’t see. And breaches can begin anywhere. Secure with Enclave and Zero Trust. Detect hidden assets, visualize your network and control communication flow so you can microsegment on demand.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Minimal effort required: Minimal effort required – no additional lift from you or your team. We can fully manage a deployment, so you have to do very little. Our team walks you through onboarding—installing an agent–and then we take it from there. We stand it up, we handle updates and changes you request. It’s as simple as sending an email.
- Detect what’s on your network: The perimeter-based security approach is outdated. Your network is now anywhere information is stored—including the cloud and whatever unauthorized tool leadership’s skunkworks team just bought. Enclave illuminates network assets wherever they exist, and creates an inventory you can use to match assets with identity and detect threat vectors.
- Reduce the impact of a breach: Breach is inevitable. But with Enclave you’re always two steps ahead of the bad guys. It limits an intruders reach, by dividing your network into distinct and separate planes; like a company’s office building with inner-office security doors, or the bulkheads of a ship.
- Minimize risk: Vulnerabilities and ever-evolving threats lurk around every corner of the internet. If that’s not enough, there’s also compliance to worry about. Take control of this never-ending game of whack a mole. Enclave will find vulnerabilities on your network, point you to their exact location and tag them by severity.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market organizations
- Small businesses
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Enclave
In Conclusion…
Choosing the right microsegmentation software is crucial for organizations looking to bolster their network security. Factors such as granularity, scalability, automation, integration, visibility, flexibility, compliance, performance, and support should all be carefully considered.
By evaluating these factors and selecting a software solution that aligns with their needs, organizations can effectively protect their network infrastructure and data from advanced threats. It’s important to remember that the best microsegmentation software will vary depending on the organization’s specific requirements and environment.
By prioritizing these key factors, organizations can make an informed decision and implement a microsegmentation strategy that enhances their overall security posture.