Today’s information security teams face two major trends that make it more challenging than ever to secure critical applications. The first is that IT infrastructure is evolving rapidly and continuously. The second is that attackers are growing more targeted and sophisticated over time.
Implementing a sound microsegmentation approach is one of the best steps that security teams can take to gain greater infrastructure visibility and secure critical applications, as it:
Delivers process-level granularity that aligns security policies with application logic
Enables security policies to be implemented consistently from the data center to the cloud
Provides consistent security across different underlying platforms
This power and flexibility is helpful to any organization considering how to best protect high-value targets like domain controllers, privileged access management systems, and jump servers. It’s also invaluable as organizations adopt cloud security services and new application deployment approaches like containers.
Microsegmentation can also play an important role in securing key vertical-specific applications, including healthcare applications containing protected health information (PHI), financial services applications that are subject to PCI DSS and other regulations, legal applications with client confidentiality implications, and many others. The additional policy granularity that microsegmentation provides makes it easier to create security boundaries around sensitive or regulated data, even when it spans multiple environments and platforms. The added visibility that microsegmentation provides is also extremely valuable during the regulatory audit process.
While IT infrastructure evolution creates new challenges for security teams, decoupling security visibility and policy controls from the underlying infrastructure ensures that critical applications can be secured effectively in heterogeneous environments with a high rate of change.