How 3 Manufacturers Secured Production-Critical Systems with Microsegmentation

The manufacturing industry has an incredibly low tolerance for downtime, and attackers know it. A single hour of downtime can cost high-volume manufacturers millions of dollars while sending shockwaves across global supply chains, and while AI-enabled attackers are moving faster than ever, the mean time to identify and contain a breach increased over the last year, according to IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report.  

Manufacturing organizations can’t afford to rely on detection and response. Security teams know microsegmentation is the answer for building preemptive cyber resilience, but legacy approaches have a track record of failing manufacturing environments specifically: complex, agent-based deployments strain lean IT teams, manual policy management can't keep pace with production schedules, and the fear of breaking a live system stalls projects before they start. 

This roundup features three Zero Networks customers that successfully deployed identity-based microsegmentation to strengthen cyber resilience without adding operational complexity. We'll walk through how these manufacturers eliminated downtime risk during implementation, met cyber insurance requirements, and extended protection to legacy systems without disrupting the infrastructure their operations depend on. 

Non-Disruptive Network Segmentation: Eliminating Outage Risk 

Many manufacturers implementing microsegmentation fear that a new security tool might lead to operational disruption. Reconfiguring network architecture often risks the exact outcome security teams are trying to prevent: unplanned downtime. That’s why half of manufacturing security leaders point to implementation complexity as their top microsegmentation concern, followed closely by disruption to existing operations. 

Real-World Examples 

Vermeer manufactures the industrial and agricultural equipment that keeps global communities fed and fueled. The security team was on a mission to find a virtual airgap solution that could enhance overall security, but with a complex network and no appetite for downtime, Vermeer couldn’t rely on traditional tools or manual approaches.  

Atlantic Constructors – a commercial construction, prefabrication, and industrial services provider – faced a version of the same concern. Rising cyber insurance requirements pushed the team to look for a microsegmentation solution, but every other product they evaluated threatened a long, complex implementation that could disrupt the business before it delivered any protection. 

The Solution: Agentless Deployment and Deterministic Policy Automation 

Vermeer and Atlantic Constructors achieved granular protection without the outage risks and implementation complexity of legacy microsegmentation tools thanks to Zero’s automated, agentless approach:  

• With an agentless architecture, Zero Networks orchestrates native, host-based firewalls already present in the environment, avoiding the latency and integration risk that comes with agent-based tools. 
• A defined learning period allows Zero's automation engine to observe real traffic and build policies from actual network behavior, removing the upfront manual burden.  
• Policies generated and enforced via deterministic, human-on-the-loop automation reflect what the network actually needs to keep running securely, not a best guess that risks blocking legitimate traffic. 

“[Zero Networks] is an agentless solution, so it’s relying on the network firewall that’s native to Windows which allows us to control both allows and denies to the PC or the host that the connections are going between. And then on top of that, they have the automatic engine that is learning, and taking that data, and translating it into rules.”  

Justin Manifold, Senior IT Security Engineer, Vermeer  

By leveraging Zero’s non-disruptive, deterministic solution, Vermeer segmented their network in 30 days while maintaining 100% of legitimate traffic. Similarly, Atlantic Constructors deployed Zero in just 15 minutes, ultimately improving network performance and reliability by 100%. 

Legacy Systems and Vendor Lock-In: Extending JIT MFA Everywhere  

Manufacturing environments are built on decades of accumulated infrastructure that many security tools aren’t designed to address. Microsegmentation vendors that require complex configurations and proprietary MFA tools force manufacturers to accept coverage gaps or introduce additional complexity into an environment that can't afford failure.  

Real-World Examples 

Mikron is the leading partner for high performance production systems, building the complex components used to produce the things that matter – pharmaceutical devices, precision medtech, automotive parts, and more. With frequent changes to the environment, maintaining consistent policies via Group Policy Objects (GPOs) proved nearly impossible, but other segmentation vendors couldn’t easily integrate with Mikron’s existing environment and required proprietary MFA systems that threatened continuity.  

Similarly, Vermeer needed a way to protect privileged access without introducing the kind of friction that would disrupt the production and engineering workflows already running smoothly. 

The Solution: Just-in-Time Network-Layer MFA  

Mikron and Vermeer closed identity least privilege gaps without risking critical connections or leaving legacy systems vulnerable by enforcing Zero’s network-layer MFA for just-in-time access:  

• Network-layer MFA extends authentication to admin protocols and privileged activities without touching the underlying legacy systems or introducing new failure points. 
• Seamless integration with existing infrastructure means a consistent user experience rather than forcing a second, proprietary authentication system into the environment. 
• Added on top of identity-based microsegmentation, network-layer MFA effectively prevents compromised credentials from delivering access to production-critical systems.  

For Vermeer, the addition of network-layer MFA gave the security team confidence to strengthen privileged access protection while maintaining the stability its always-on manufacturing environment requires. Since Zero Networks integrated seamlessly with Mikron’s environment – no proprietary tooling or rip-and-replace approach required – Mikron achieved the comprehensive protection they needed without risking operational disruption, completing full network segmentation rollout within weeks and at a fraction of the effort GPOs demanded.  

Cyber Insurance and Compliance Requirements: Validating Protection 

In the industrial sector, cyber insurance has become table stakes, and carriers are asking for proof that cybersecurity strategies translate to real resilience. Over two-thirds of manufacturers say their cyber insurance carrier requires network segmentation specifically, and that mandate is only getting harder to satisfy with labor-intensive legacy approaches.  

Real-World Example 

Atlantic Constructors' search for a microsegmentation solution was driven directly by rising cyber insurance requirements. The team needed to strengthen its overall security posture in a way that would hold up to scrutiny – and once Zero Networks was deployed, the organization put it to the test.  

The Solution: Cyber Resilient Segmentation Architecture 

With Zero’s identity-based microsegmentation in place, Atlantic Constructors unlocked the compliance evidence they needed without creating a new manual burden for the security team:  

• Continuous, automated policy enforcement generates audit-ready evidence of segmentation as a byproduct of normal operation, rather than requiring a separate compliance exercise. 
• Because policies enforce least-privilege access by default, the pathways attackers and penetration testers rely on are closed structurally, before a test ever finds them. 
• Real-time network mapping demonstrates current resilience posture, unlocking up-to-date visibility into real risk exposure.  

“After we got Zero, I decided to run another pen test to see how things were working, and we literally could not get it to penetrate one of the machines we were testing … We did some speed tests and [network] performance probably doubled. Reliability went up 100%.” 

Jim Paolicelli, IT Director, Atlantic Constructors 

With the impact of microsegmentation validated through penetration testing, Atlantic Constructors ultimately traded multiple legacy platforms for Zero Networks’ unified solution.  

Built-in Cyber Resilience and Supply Chain Stability with Zero Networks  

From outage risks due to implementation complexity to legacy system constraints and beyond, manufacturers have long faced microsegmentation hurdles that cause initiatives to stall. Zero Networks removes those barriers and enables manufacturing organizations to secure complex environments, protect legacy systems, and boost operational resilience in days – not years.  

By delivering automated, identity-driven microsegmentation that seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructure combined with network-layer MFA for privileged access, Zero removes the manual effort and outage concerns that make legacy tools too risky to industrial orgs.  

See how Zero Networks makes cyber resilience practical for manufacturers – request a demo.