Software-Defined Network Security with Micro-segmentation
Micro-segmentation uses virtualization technology to create an ever-increasing number of granular secure zones in networks. By applying detailed security policies, micro-segmentation moves security away from networks and IP locations and bases security on user identities and applications – users just get the access they need, which forestalls page traffic within the network. It is a core technology for zero trust, the possibility that nobody should trust or have more access than they need.
The advantages of micro-segmentation–
SDN Micro-segmentation offers companies various advantages:
- Decreased attack surface: Micro-segmentation restricts the attacker’s capacity to move horizontally through a network, at last lessening the potential attack surface.
- Threat Detection and Response: Even with improved security practices, breaches are obvious. However, micro-segmentation can drastically improve threat location and response times. When policy violations are recognized, micro-segmentation devices can create real-time alarms and even block unapproved activity.
- Administrative Compliance: Micro-segmentation can strengthen the company’s administrative compliance by creating segments that store specific managed information. The compliance-oriented policy would then be able to be drawn up for these segments. This also significantly improves the audit process.
Essential security strategies Micro-segmentation with zero-trust
The headlines throughout the most recent couple of years have been steady, with organizations emptying more and more money into cybersecurity countermeasures. There are signs that 2021 won’t be different, with very nearly 75% of CISO intending to ask their CFOs one year from now to invest more in cybersecurity.
The CISOs are progressively turning their investments towards improved prevention methods versus remedial methodologies. It isn’t so much that they’re not searching for upgrades in orchestration and automation to deal with security incidents, yet they’re trying harder to avoid incidents from happening at all (or if nothing else to diminish their effect).
About lessening the effect, micro-segmentation is a significant issue that many teams are addressing, and companies are investing in enhanced preventive measures by leveraging isolation technology.
Micro-segmentation
The guarantee of micro-segmentation is clear: By creating highly granular segments in an IT infrastructure, a company successfully restricts the size of the attack surface of its network by breaking it into small pieces. If one specific segment is undermined, other segments are “walled” and secured.
Micro-segmentation lines up with the standards of zero-trust security, which requires satisfactory approval and approval for limited access to applications, information, or systems. With a zero-trust approach, all gadgets, networks, and resources are micro-segmented and individual access is limited to give users just what they need access to. Granular micro-segmentation can be complex to implement and manage, however, the thinner an organization can make its segments, the more prominent the security advantage it will accomplish.
From a technological viewpoint, Next Generation firewalls (NGFWs) are key devices that empower segmentation, yet companies need to abuse integral strategies beyond NGFW, for example, software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined perimeters (SDPs), cloud-access service brokers (CASB), encryption and proxies to dispatch a micro-segmentation approach that secures their information where it exists.
One final point for micro-segmentation – when detecting access policies for microsegments, applications, and other system resources, it is significant to have a system that allows session-based data that can be utilized to adjust your decisions of access policy.
One model is having the adaptability to deny an individual access to a database on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that they routinely approve if the user requests access from a remote area or a gadget that doesn’t have the last security update required.
Isolation (Separation)
What do you do about the resources that users need to access that can’t be simply segmented? The web is a valid example. Truly, you can utilize threat intelligence to try to detent known terrible sites and notable sites, however, shouldn’t something be said about the great big middle ground?? There are a million numbers of sites that have a limited reputation history and have similar risk scores to a 5 out of 10 on a 10 point scale. Should users be obstructed from access them? It appears to be sensible, except if you are the worker who needs to contact a site to perform a basic business function and you can’t reach it.
Be that as it may, with the greatest threat vector for fruitful malware delivery ever being the web and email, unreasonable obstructing has become the backbone position, creating unhappy users and operational disturbances for IT teams.
In any case, another method, called Remote Browser Isolation (RBI), has changed the battleground for companies that want to open up access to the web while improving threat anticipation and security. Here’s how it works:
- RBI forestalls ransomware and advanced web threats from reaching the user’s endpoint by executing dynamic web content in an isolated remote container in the cloud.
- An interactive media stream representing the site is sent to the endpoint browser, giving a secure and consistent user experience.
- Regardless of whether users are browsing a malicious webpage all alone or getting one by clicking a URL implanted in a phishing email or a malicious PDF file, they are secured, since no web content is ever executed directly on the gadget.
- The malware is “walled” before the endpoint, whatever may be the level of trust and organizational positions on the site. This methodology is called zero-trust navigation.
Zero-Trust Access
Regardless of whether approved users need to interface with network resources or need to wander into the network to perform significant assignments, access can and should be granted through the perspective of a zero-trust security system. At every possible opportunity, set micro-segmentation as basic control of a zero-trust network. When this is beyond the realm of imagination or practical, search for corresponding zero-trust procedures, for example, isolation, and separation, to stretch out zero-trust to other parts of your IT infrastructure.
