What Is Microsegmentation, and Why Do Organizations Need It?

Why Microsegmentation Is Important

Microsegmentation enables organizations to shift from perimeter-based defenses to workload-specific protection. It isolates internal (east-west) traffic and decouples security controls from physical infrastructure, creating a flexible and reliable security model. This is highly effective in cloud environments, where consistent policy enforcement and zero trust principles are essential for reducing risks and maintaining operations.

Benefits of Microsegmentation

• Gain real-time visibility: Get an accurate inventory of assets with rich metadata to help understand the resources deployed in a multicloud environment.
• Limit lateral movement: Granular segments prevent attackers from spreading across the network in the event of a compromise, shutting down attacks such as ransomware.
• Protect finances and reputation: Limiting the impact of attacks helps avoid costly recovery efforts, fines, and loss of customer trust.
• Simplify management: Identity-based policies adjust automatically to changes in the environment, reducing manual work and avoiding downtime.
• Improve control: Centralized, application-aware controls provide clear insights into network traffic and help focus on the greatest risks.
• Streamline compliance and audits: Granular security controls and better visibility simplify audits and make it easier to meet regulatory mandates.
• Enforce zero trust principles: Automated tools apply strict access rules, reducing the attack surface and preventing unauthorized access to critical systems.

How Microsegmentation Works

Microsegmentation enforces identity-based policies with high granularity, down to the level of individual applications, devices, and processes.

Here’s a basic look at how microsegmentation works in a typical organization:

• Map assets and traffic flows: Examine workloads, apps, and their interactions to gain clear visibility into east-west traffic and uncover potential vulnerabilities across the network.
• Set least-privilege policies: Develop granular rules to ensure that each workload or application only communicates with what is strictly necessary for its function.
• Enforce dynamic controls: Assign policies based on workload identities rather than static IPs or hardware, ensuring consistent security as workloads move or scale.
• Monitor and adjust: Continuously track traffic, enforce policies, and block unauthorized access in real time. Quickly contain threats to prevent lateral movement of threats.

Microsegmentation Use Cases

Microsegmentation is essential to the success of several common enterprise use cases, including:

• Secure cloud migration: Isolate workloads and enforce consistent policies across hybrid and multicloud environments to minimize risk and disruption as you migrate workloads to the cloud.
• Streamline M&A: Integrate networks from acquired companies securely by isolating sensitive systems, stopping lateral movement, and applying unified security policies.
• Enable zero trust strategies: Enforce strict access controls and verify every user and device to align with zero trust principles and protect critical business assets.
• Simplify regulatory compliance: Meet regulatory mandates like HIPAA or GDPR by applying granular controls, securing sensitive data, and providing comprehensive audit trails.
• Scale secure operations: Effortlessly scale operations by adapting security policies to new infrastructure, applications, or offices, without causing downtime or disruptions.

Microsegmentation vs. Network Segmentation

Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, network segmentation and microsegmentation serve different purposes. Network segmentation works best for high-level isolation of zones, while microsegmentation takes a more granular, adaptable approach that better suits modern environments like the cloud.

How Microsegmentation Addresses the Limits of Traditional Segmentation

Legacy network segmentation relies on static methods like IP addresses, ports, and firewalls to secure zones. While effective for north-south traffic, it struggles with east-west traffic—communication between internal workloads and applications. Once attackers gain access to a "secure zone," they can move laterally across the network, increasing the risk of damage from advanced attacks such as ransomware.

These traditional methods also face challenges with visibility and complexity. They show how communication happens (e.g., IP address, port) but not what is communicating, such as specific applications or data flows. This lack of context makes it harder to enforce granular policies, adds operational overhead, and drives costs up.

Microsegmentation fixes these gaps by isolating workloads and securing traffic within zones. Workload metadata-based policies ensure only authorized communication, dynamically adapting to changes like cloud migrations or scaling. It provides better visibility, stronger containment of threats, and reduced management burdens for today’s complex IT environments.

Best Practices to Prepare for Successful Microsegmentation

The success of your microsegmentation strategy depends on careful preparation to align it with your organization’s needs. Follow these best practices to lay the groundwork for success:

1. Understand your environment: Map your workloads, applications, user roles, and traffic flows to identify critical assets and uncover potential vulnerabilities.
2. Define least-privilege policies: Work with stakeholders to establish access rules that limit each user or resource to only the data and systems they need.
3. Align with your IAM system: Ensure your identity and access management (IAM) platform is set up to support granular role-based access and zero trust.
4. Plan for scalability: Choose solutions that can dynamically adjust to network growth, cloud migrations, or IT infrastructure changes without major reconfigurations.
5. Commit to visibility and audits: Prioritize tools that offer real-time traffic monitoring, reporting, and auditing features to ensure policies remain effective.
6. Engage the right vendor: Choose a technology partner that offers expertise, automation, and support tailored to your industry and security goals.

How Zscaler Delivers Zero Trust Segmentation

Zscaler Microsegmentation delivers zero trust segmentation through a cloud native zero trust architecture that reduces complexity and costs compared to traditional solutions. Designed for modern multicloud and hybrid environments, Zscaler removes operational barriers to help you adopt zero trust segmentation efficiently, providing:

• Comprehensive visibility: View a detailed inventory of assets and real-time traffic flows between workloads, eliminating blind spots.
• AI-driven automation: Receive automated policy recommendations to create precise, granular rules with minimal management effort.
• Reduced attack surface: Enforce zero trust principles to restrict east-west traffic, eliminating lateral movement and unauthorized access.
• Integration without complexity: Extend the Zscaler platform for microsegmentation without the high costs and hassle of point solutions.
• Built-in scalability: Adapt policies automatically as networks evolve, migrate, or adopt new workloads, ensuring consistent security.