The Benefits of Microsegmentation for Compliance

When working to achieve and prove compliance, your security and compliance teams need solutions that can overcome several significant challenges.

• Complex regulations. There’s a great deal of complexity in complying with evolving regulatory frameworks, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

• Granular requirements. Many new cybersecurity regulations increasingly call for more granular separation and control over data to ensure customer privacy, improve security posture, and demonstrate compliance.

• Complex environments. Security teams could once ensure compliance by physically segmenting IT infrastructure, but this approach is no longer viable. The traditional network perimeter has all but disappeared, and workloads have become dynamic, spanning multiple geographies, time zones, machines, hybrid cloud environments, virtual machines (VMs), and containers.

• Poor visibility. Hybrid environments, cloud services, containerization, and other IT trends make it harder for your IT teams to see every data asset, let alone protect each one.

• Remote work. With more employees working at home or outside the office, security teams face greater challenges when securing data, endpoint devices, and connections. Workers frequently access network resources via unsecured connections on unmanaged devices, making it more difficult to isolate, track, and protect assets affected by regulatory requirements.

Microsegmentation is an approach to network security that divides, or segments, the network into small sections or secure zones, protecting each area with security controls based on the needs of each segment. Segments of a network might include operating systems, VMs, applications, and individual workloads.

In contrast to hardware-based network segmentation that protects the north-south traffic between data centers, software-defined microsegmentation requires no hardware and secures east-west traffic flowing among servers and applications. Using security policies customized for each segment, microsegmentation limits the type of traffic that can move across the network and determines how applications and workloads share data. 

This granular level of control significantly limits the blast radius of a successful attack, preventing attackers who have breached one part of a network from accessing other assets within it.

Microsegmentation aids compliance by enabling your security teams to:

• Gain deeper visibility

• Increase security for assets subject to regulation

• Reduce the scope of compliance environments

• Streamline compliance efforts and audit processes

• Support a Zero Trust approach to security

Solutions for microsegmentation and compliance provide extensive visibility into hybrid IT environments and all the connections and communications within them. With greater visibility, teams can more accurately segment compliance-related data and workloads and protect them with custom segmentation policies.

By strictly controlling network access and isolating individual workloads with custom security policies, microsegmentation provides greater protection for sensitive data by reducing the attack surface, preventing unauthorized access, minimizing data breaches, and blocking cyberthreats. 

Microsegmentation is especially effective at limiting lateral movement — the steps taken by attackers who have successfully breached defenses and are attempting to move to other parts of the network to compromise high-value assets.

When security teams can segment compliance-related data from other IT assets, they can significantly minimize the scope of compliance efforts, reducing cost and complexity.

By reducing the scope of compliance environments and making it easier to demonstrate compliance, microsegmentation simplifies the job of complying with audit requests and processes.

Microsegmentation supports a Zero Trust security model by implementing strong identity and access control and enabling a least-privilege approach to granting access to compliance-related data.

Microsegmentation can play a significant role in ensuring compliance with a wide range of regulatory environments:

• PCI DSS

• HIPAA

• GDPR

• SWIFT

PCI DSS v4.0 requires organizations to protect cardholder data throughout its lifecycle. Microsegmentation helps by limiting unauthorized access to data and creating secure zones in which only authorized users and systems can access that data. Microsegmentation also reduces the scope of PCI DSS compliance efforts, minimizes the impact of data breaches, and provides deeper visibility to help security teams ensure that each secure zone has the appropriate controls in place.

Microsegmentation helps healthcare organizations improve their security posture by protecting sensitive patient health information (PHI) and isolating critical systems. Organizations can create dedicated segments for medical imaging systems, electronic health records (EHR), and other critical assets. When attackers successfully breach defenses, microsegmentation enables fast mitigation while protecting other parts of the network.

Microsegmentation simplifies compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by providing visibility into where sensitive data resides, limiting access to it, and simplifying audits.

Microsegmentation helps financial organizations comply with mandates for isolating compliance-related data from the rest of the organization’s network. Microsegmentation and compliance solutions also enable granular control over access, improve threat detection capabilities, speed incident response, and simplify the task of demonstrating compliance with SWIFT requirements.

There’s a great deal of variety in the technology available for managing microsegmentation and compliance. When choosing a solution, security teams should look for solutions that can:

• Provide detailed visibility. The best solutions will offer visibility into an entire IT environment, including data centers, legacy applications, and east-west traffic. The right solution should offer always-on visibility with rich context, allowing IT teams to see what’s happening in the data center and to evaluate the effectiveness of specific security measures.

• Manage segmentation without the need to re-architect infrastructure. Security teams would be wise to select a solution that can implement segmentation without needing to reconfigure networks, make changes to applications, or create virtual local area networks (VLANs). Technology that can support anything from bare metal to containers in the cloud will reduce costs and save a considerable amount of time.

• Meet multiple requirements with one solution. A microsegmentation and compliance solution that fulfills multiple needs with one tool allows teams to manage compliance more effectively while spending less time on installation, training, maintenance, and configuration.

• Offer an infrastructure-agnostic implementation. As compliance requirements evolve, a solution that is infrastructure-agnostic and ready for DevOps enables compliance processes to be automated and integrated into operational cycles.

When it comes to regulatory compliance, microsegmentation offers several advantages over traditional security approaches like firewalls and VLANs.

• More granular control. Microsegmentation enables more precise, granular control over traffic flowing across individual workloads and applications. Firewalls usually control traffic at the perimeter or among large network segments, while VLANs control traffic at the network layer but with less granularity.  

• Greater flexibility. Microsegmentation policies can be easily adapted to meet evolving requirements without requiring significant changes to network infrastructure. In contrast, firewall rules are more difficult to adjust, and the rigidity of VLANs may require more substantial changes to implement new policies.

• Effective breach containment. Microsegmentation effectively stops lateral movement after a breach to protect critical systems and sensitive data.

• Easier audit response. Microsegmentation and compliance solutions provide clear logs and audit trails for each part of the segmented network, simplifying compliance reporting.

• Consistent policy enforcement. Microsegmentation solutions and compliance can apply policy more consistently across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

• Deeper visibility. Microsegmentation technologies increase visibility into traffic within the network, helping to detect potential breaches more effectively. Traditional firewalls have little visibility into internal network traffic, and VLANs manage traffic without necessarily analyzing it for security.

Learn more about microsegmentation and compliance solutions from Akamai.