Protecting your network requires more than keeping threats out. It means minimizing the damage those threats that breach your defenses can do once they’re inside. This is particularly true since new architectures, like the cloud, make the network perimeter unclear. Rather than trying to focus on the boundary, it’s necessary to bring defenses inside the data center.

Protecting the Network Inside the Data Center

There are several approaches to increasing security inside a data center. The first approach is to simply add traditional security measures internally, that is, add firewalls to local network segments to protect the most critical applications. This has several limitations. It can be prohibitively costly to deploy a large number of physical firewalls and challenging to manually provision policies. The protection offered is limited, lacking the ability to protect other applications if malware penetrates one device, and inflexible. The rules are defined in terms of IP address and ports, so if applications and data move to other devices and network segments, the protection doesn’t travel with them.

You can also use virtual firewall, which use software to implement the firewall. Because licenses are needed, the costs can add up. They also require the same high level of manual configuration and support as do physical firewalls, which also adds to the costs.

Microsegmentation provides a more flexible means of implementing protection inside the data center that provides truly fine-grained security cost effectively. Network security is implemented through software-defined policies tied to applications and workloads rather than IP addresses and network segments. There’s less manual work involved and the policies can migrate along with applications, making them responsive to change. The policies help contain threats after a breach by limiting movement of data through the network. Making the policies effective, then, requires having a good understanding of how applications communicate and the necessary traffic flow. Policies should be written from the inside out, by defining which traffic is allowed, rather than specifying which traffic is not allowed.

Microsegmentation Means Security Is Constant Even When It Changes

Microsegmentation does more than just enhance network security. It enables automation of network configuration and provisioning, freeing resources for other work. By tying security to workloads rather than network addresses, it ensures that security goes with the application wherever it resides. Security is made explicit rather than assumed based on a server’s IP address.

Microsegmentation is one new method of protecting your network, but needs to be part of a comprehensive information security strategy. There’s still a place for firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and data loss prevention software. Prescient Solutions will conduct a thorough infrastructure assessment to identify your vulnerabilities and craft a customized cybersecurity solution to protect your valuable information assets. Our team of experts is certified in security policies and tools, as well as the network products and hypervisors that make up your infrastructure. Contact us to find out whether microsegmentation should be part of your security strategy and what you need to do to implement and support it.

Additional Network Resources

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Protecting Your Network Begins With Controlling the Devices that Connect to It

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