Most cybersecurity leaders use microsegmentation to augment corporate network security

In today’s era of remote employees and an ever expanding variety of connected devices, network security is becoming increasingly complex. To compensate, cybersecurity professionals have expanded their programs to go beyond traditional perimeter-based security and include microsegmentation.

In fact, four out of five cybersecurity leaders now employ microsegmentation in addition to traditional perimeter-based security for their corporate networks, according to a survey by Byos.

Microsegmentation is a method of creating small, distinct zones in edge computing environments, IoT networks, data centers and cloud environments. It allows security professionals to isolate and mitigate potential network threats.

The natural successor to basic network segmentation, microsegmentation breaks the entire network down to its least divisible components — its endpoints — and provides robust protection and threat mitigation for each component. Byos surveyed 100 cybersecurity leaders in Q3 of 2021 to understand their use of microsegmentation to protect their networks.

The state of microsegmentation in network security

• 83% of cybersecurity leaders currently augment their corporate network’s perimeter security with microsegmentation in some form; Of the 17% of cybersecurity leaders who do not currently deploy microsegmentation, most of them — 65% — claim it is on their roadmap.
• 88% of cybersecurity leaders believe microsegmentation is essential to achieving Zero Trust network security, while 92% of cybersecurity leaders believe microsegmentation is more practical and efficient than its alternatives.
• The top industries leading the way in microsegmentation adoption are manufacturing (95%), information and data services (92%), and financial services (92%), followed by healthcare and social services (80%), education (77%) and software (73%).
• Of those cybersecurity professionals who have yet to implement microsegmentation, 35% said they lack the people necessary to make the shift, 29% said they lack room in the budget, and another 29% indicated a lack of time was their primary constraint.
• A rise of cyberattacks on their organization was the main motivation for implementing microsegmentation, cited by 53% of respondents, followed by a growing attack surface (47%), fear that a lack of microsegmentation leaves their organization vulnerable (35%), and the vulnerabilities of their legacy devices (29%).
• The main features that cybersecurity leaders look for when choosing a microsegmentation solution include real-time threat management (76%), secure remote access (67%), and a ransomware kill switch (62%), among others.

“When Gartner first identified microsegmentation as a key emerging technology for information security in 2016, many security experts were unfamiliar with the concept, but here we are just five years later, and we see that it has been widely recognized as a crucial component of any security infrastructure,” said Matias Katz, CEO at Byos.

“Today, there is little doubt that microsegmentation is an important method for stopping attackers from moving laterally to other systems once they have compromised a network. Our solution takes the complexity out of microsegmentation, making it easier for IT teams to implement.”