Microsegmentation vs. Zero Trust: What’s the Difference?

Data breaches, for the most part, have been on a steady increase over the past several years. For instance, the year 2010 saw 662 breaches. However, if you fast-forward to 2023, there were 3,205 data compromises in the United States alone.

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting victims of ID theft, last year’s 3,205 compromises was a record-setting year. This number of breaches exceeded 2022 by 1,404 breaches and, for 2021, by 1,345 compromises. This was a whopping 78% over 2022 and 72% over 2021, the previous record-setting year.

It’s clear that modern organizations cannot afford to be complacent when it comes to protecting their data and IT assets. Threat actors continue to get savvier by the year, and it is up to businesses, government agencies and other organizations to actively combat them to securely preserve and maintain IT assets. To accomplish this, we all must be proactive and continuously implement both proven and new strategies.

Microsegmentation and zero trust can play a large role in meeting your organizational goals to prevent and mitigate the damages caused by the exploits of cyber criminals. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at both microsegmentation and zero trust and explain how these strategies can easily assimilate into your security strategy and help to improve your overall security posture.

Microsegmentation

Microsegmentation is a strategy typically implemented at the network level, often using virtualized environments. As a security technique, microsegmentation divides a network into smaller, isolated segments (“zones”), each having its own security policies. This helps keep your network granular and empowers you to have more control than network segmentation. It is a complex strategy but is a good solution to help prevent or limit damage in the event a threat actor tries or succeeds in exploiting your IT infrastructure.

What is the purpose of microsegmentation?

The main goal of microsegmentation is to minimize the potential damage from cyberattacks by containing them within a small segment of the network. This is beneficial because it counteracts an exploiter’s ability to bring down an entire system, either breaching your data or preventing operational processes from being able to be used.

In essence, when you integrate microsegmentation, you would be maintaining a “segmented” structure that is no longer vulnerable to your entire system being brought down. For instance, you can:

• Restrict access to designated areas housing sensitive data to keep prying eyes out
• Establish limited access to “need to know” users from specific areas of your network
• Do development and testing in a separate environment from areas where you manage and store sensitive data so as to not accidentally use data for testing
• Increase security and better manage your hybrid cloud structure
• And more

Essentially, microsegmentation limits the scope of a potential attack and prevents the threat actor from accessing all areas of your network. It also helps protect against careless or inadvertent mistakes by your internal users, since you can prioritize who has access, limiting the number of users to access critical parts of your system. This can somewhat be likened to allowing access on a “need-to-know” basis.

How does microsegmentation work?

To leverage microsegmentation, you establish software-defined policies to create secure “zones” in your data centers and cloud environments. The traffic within and between segments is then monitored and controlled based on any predefined rules you set. Setting up microsegmentation requires detailed planning and continuous management. This is to ensure your policies are up-to-date and effective.

Benefits of microsegmentation

If your organization chooses to integrate microsegmentation into its IT strategy, you will find it offers many benefits, such as the following:

• An increase in granular visibility into your workload connections
• Implements reduced avenues for attack
• Provides real-time insight into any suspicious network activity
• Secures your critical applications
• Helps maintain your organization’s compliance requirements
• Streamlines the environment separation process
• Simplifies your overall policy management

Where microsegmentation really shines is in its capabilities to boost your security posture, by minimizing risks without impacting user access or hindering the day-to-day use of your network.

Zero Trust

Zero Trust is a security model based on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” The fundamental philosophy behind it assumes that any threat can come from either outside or inside your network. The bottom line is no user or device should ever be trusted by default, because vulnerabilities can potentially exist anywhere, especially if you aren’t careful. Never assume any entity or individual is fully trustworthy since people can become compromised, either intentionally or accidentally.

Traditional approaches assume external network requests are not automatically trustworthy, but internal requests are reliable. This can lead to complacency and trust in vulnerable areas of your IT makeup. The reality is that serious threats can come from either externally or internally to your organization. Zero trust considers this possibility and is designed to circumvent breaches and/or attacks since anyone in your organization or agency could be either intentionally or unintentionally compromised.

The zero-trust methodology is designed to bolster an organization’s cybersecurity strategy and tighten its defenses across its entire architecture, including any multi-cloud or distributed data locations. To achieve zero trust, it requires an organization to perform continuous authentication and authorization of users and devices before granting access to any network resources.

How does Zero Trust work?

For zero trust to successfully work, it would require your organizational decision-makers to take a comprehensive approach involving identity verification, the definition of protect surface, initiating access controls and continuous monitoring. To accomplish the integration of a zero-trust strategy, you should use or deploy a combination of technologies, including:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Identity and access management (IAM)
• SASE (secure access service edge)
• Endpoint security
• Microsegmentation
• Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)

Essentially, there are many technical approaches necessary to succeed in establishing and achieving a zero trust structure. Working with a knowledgeable and experienced professional team, such as Red River’s experts, to help you, your organization can integrate and execute a zero trust strategy utilizing the most current and best practices.

Benefits of Leveraging Zero Trust Architecture

Not only does leveraging a zero-trust strategy provide better overall cybersecurity for an organization, it can offer you many other benefits as well, including but not limited to the following advantages:

• Reduce the risk of your data being exploited
• Minimize the risk of your bank accounts being pilfered by cyber criminals
• Achieve granular access control over your cloud and container environments
• Improve regulatory compliance (you can stay ahead of future mandates that are undoubtedly going to come)
• Build a reputation as a trustworthy organization that takes security seriously (all it takes is one breach to destroy or seriously harm your organization’s reputation)

Even if a threat actor steals and uses legitimate credentials or otherwise achieves a successful attack, a zero-trust strategy significantly mitigates and limits the damage the cybercriminal can do. This is because zero trust is implemented across your entire IT infrastructure, including networks, applications and devices, so their reach can be significantly limited if they do happen to infiltrate.

Can Microsegmentation and Zero Trust Work Together?

A zero-trust strategy is a philosophy rooted in technical solutions to help promote a secure IT environment. It trusts no one. Microsegmentation is often included as a zero-trust element because the two can easily be managed simultaneously and be leveraged to improve your organization’s security posture. Microsegmentation is relatively new but has quickly proven to be a good strategy to help preserve, protect and maintain safe networks. (Not to be confused with network segmentation, which is not the same.)

In fact, microsegmentation may stand as one of the most highly refined components utilized in zero trust strategies, since you can set multiple security rule sets in each network “compartment”. There are a number of ways you can implement microsegmentation, such as by segregating information based on job position and position, which is the most common way it is implemented. Alternatively, you can create “compartments” based on files and programs used by individual users if you prefer.

Like the overall zero trust methodology, utilizing microsegmentation helps support the belief that no one, either internal or external to your organization should automatically be trusted. Vulnerabilities can exist anywhere. Thus, these strict access controls help prevent accidental or intentional exploits.

To put it this way, microsegmentation is typically applied at the network level, whereas zero trust is a holistic approach applied across the entire IT infrastructure. They are fully complementary to one another, and one can be used to help achieve the other’s goals.

Leveraging Zero Trust and Microsegmentation Together is a Smart Strategy

Whether your organization is a private company, government contractor, government agency, nonprofit or other entity, your data is an important asset. If your network or other architectural components become compromised, it can result in severe costs, high penalties and costly remediation.

No organization can afford to be complacent about security nowadays and, regardless of the type of organization you are, you must consider cybersecurity strategies and determine which ones are best to help protect your organization’s IT assets.

A microsegmentation zero trust strategy combination is one way you can help eliminate, or, at a minimum, significantly mitigate threats. While the process is highly complex, if you can successfully integrate the philosophy and technical solutions into your IT infrastructure and overall cybersecurity strategy, you can better arm yourself against the intentional exploits and risks coming from threat actors, along with the accidental (or purposeful) breaches caused by anyone using your network and IT assets.

Are You Ready to Bolster Your Overall Cybersecurity Strategy?

If one thing is for certain, the changes that come with technology are continuously occurring and it can be difficult to keep up. It is also certain cyber criminals actively work to get ahead of new technology and any defensive strategies implemented. They work hard to exploit organizations to gain access to lucrative data to either sell or ransom it.

At Red River, our job is to help you stay ahead of the bad guys and provide you with the knowledge and tools you need to help combat them. One solution is implementing a zero-trust strategy, including microsegmentation. However, to accomplish this, any organization will face numerous complexities.

Red River has a long, proven history of providing its customers with excellence in IT support and solutions. Founded in 1995, our company prides itself on providing cutting-edge technological security solutions, along with top-notch service. As technology evolves, we evolve with it to empower us to provide the latest and most secure solutions. Our knowledgeable and professional staff can give you access to the expertise and experience your organization may need.

To schedule a consultation to discuss your organization’s IT and/or cybersecurity needs, contact Red River today. We can help you fill any technology gaps or requirements your organization has for cybersecurity and/or compliance. We look forward to connecting with you!