Our Top Takeaways from 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Microsegmentation
Hybrid environments, a sharp increase in ransomware attacks, and stringent compliance mandates are some of the daily challenges faced by today’s security teams. At the same time, perimeter-based security solutions, such as traditional network firewalls and VPNs, are no longer valid in today’s threat landscape.
According to the first Gartner® Market Guide for Microsegmentation: “Security and risk management (SRM) leaders are primarily adopting and implementing microsegmentation technologies as part of a larger zero trust architecture initiative to stop lateral movement in hybrid environments.”
Gartner named Akamai a Representative Vendor in their 2023 Market Guide.
Our 4 top takeaways
The report presents the views of Gartner® on the current and future key microsegmentation trends so you can choose the right solution and protect your organization. Our four top takeaways from the full report are:
- Microsegmentation adoption will soar
- Interest in microsegmentation spans all verticals and geographies
- A phased approach with Zero Trust projects
- Microsegmentation vendors to add ZTNA capabilities
1. Microsegmentation adoption will soar
According to Gartner, “By 2026, 60% of enterprises working toward zero trust architecture will use more than one deployment form of microsegmentation, which is up from less than 5% in 2023.” While legacy perimeter-based solutions can still enforce policies among network sites, they fall short when it comes to segmenting east-west traffic between workloads.
Gartner recommends that SRM leaders implement microsegmentation “to enable policies at the workload level to stop lateral movement and limit the blast radius of malware by leveraging discovery features and integration with cloud infrastructure automation to ease initial work and operational maintenance.”
2. Interest in microsegmentation spans all verticals and geographies
The microsegmentation market is booming. Gartner sees interest in microsegmentation across all verticals and geographic areas. Digital transformation and the rise of ransomware are the main driving forces behind this interest. Over the past few years, we have seen ransomware target organizations in every industry.
Therefore, microsegmentation, which was once reserved for enterprises and sizable organizations, has now made its way into the mainstream, and even midsized organizations are evaluating microsegmentation solutions.
3. A phased approach with Zero Trust projects
Gartner recommends that organizations “scale progressively by choosing which workloads to prioritize, in stages, and be conservative when defining project planning.” Organizations should prioritize selecting vendors that provide segmentation solutions that are not only scalable and flexible but also align with their changing business needs.
Start by aligning your Zero Trust investments to your most pressing business needs and opt for a trusted Zero Trust vendor over vendors that evolved overnight by rebranding their older solution as Zero Trust.
4. Microsegmentation vendors to add ZTNA capabilities
The report notes, “Longer-term, Gartner observes that microsegmentation vendors try to expand beyond the initial scope of segmentation assets within a data center by adding remote access features (e.g., zero trust network access [ZTNA]).”
Akamai's strategy is to bring highly capable Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and segmentation capabilities together into a unified core architecture for Zero Trust.
How we believe Akamai delivers on all Gartner requirements
Akamai provides the most flexible microsegmentation solution with security capabilities, which can help you get more value for your segmentation investment.
Akamai’s alignment to core capabilities listed in the report include:
Flow mapping. Flow mapping allows you to gather and show north/south and east/west traffic flow and use them in the policy definition. Akamai’s visibility map, Reveal, automatically discovers and visualizes all applications, workloads, and communication flows down to the process-level context across containers, Internet of Things/operational technology (IoT/OT), and virtual machines. This visualization enables security teams to easily label and group all assets and applications, detect risk, and automatically create least-privilege security policies.
Workload isolation based on security policy. Akamai allows microsegmentation between any two workloads across any environment and uses an infinite number of labels to define policy between those workloads. A flexibility of labels is critical to expressing different types of policy.
Policy enforcement, including the definition of rules based on various factors. With Akamai, policies can be based on granular settings (not just IP or port), such as multidimensional labels to automate policy deployment or other application characteristics. Attributes are collected automatically and shown in the Reveal map.
Deploy in virtualized and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments. Akamai provides the most comprehensive microsegmentation solution across any environment, including cloud, virtualized, and on-premises environments with the ability to scale to any size.
Akamai also offers key optional capabilities
Akamai also offers key optional microsegmentation capabilities that are included in the Gartner Market Guide for Microsegmentation, such as:
Asset discovery. Akamai shows more advanced context for the assets, including creating labels that reflect the current state of all workloads based on a specific Guardicore Insight query.
Policy recommendation engine. Policy is automated with multidimensional labels and policy templates.
Threat detection. Akamai provides myriad threat detection capabilities, including reputation analysis, dynamic deception, and managed threat hunting.
Interoperability with third-party integration. Akamai gives you interoperability with various firewalls and hardware such as switches to support microsegmentation for OT/IoT environments.
- IoT/OT coverage. Akamai fingerprints, visualizes, and enforces policy on all IoT/OT systems alongside your IT infrastructure in a single view.
Learn more
For more details, read the full Market Guide.
Gartner, Market Guide for Microsegmentation, Adam Hils, Rajpreet Kaur, Jeremy D'Hoinne, 12 June 2023.
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