How Microsegmentation Works: Benefits, Challenges, and Built-in Zero Trust

Cyberattacks are growing more common and more costly. The number of data breach notices issued in 2024 jumped 312% over the previous year, and the global average cost of a data breach spiked to $4.88M – for organizations grappling with a high level of security system complexity, that number climbed to $5.76M. 

In this era of rising cyber threats, organizations are embracing modern microsegmentation to accelerate Zero Trust, contain breaches immediately, and expedite compliance initiatives by substantially reducing the time, cost, and disruption associated with traditional network segmentation.  

We’ll explore how microsegmentation works, its top benefits, and investigate common microsegmentation implementation challenges on the Zero Trust journey.  

Defining (and Redefining) Microsegmentation 

Microsegmentation (or micro-segmentation) is a cybersecurity technique that divides a network into isolated segments, each functioning as an independent security zone. These segments can be as granular as individual machines, applications, or workloads.  

The goal is to reduce the attack surface and contain potential breaches by ensuring attackers cannot move laterally across the network – even if one segment is compromised. While microsegmentation is an advanced approach to network security, not all solutions are created equal; there’s an increasingly apparent divide emerging between legacy implementations and modern microsegmentation.  

How Does Microsegmentation Work? Modern vs. Legacy Implementations 

Modern microsegmentation isolates every network asset using its host-OS firewall and the existing network fabric. Leading solutions automate functions like asset tagging, grouping, and policy creation, enabling a set-it-and-forget-it approach that drastically accelerates deployment. Modern microsegmentation also provides just-in-time access, enabling organizations to protect sensitive clients, servers, legacy applications, databases, and OT/IoT devices while leveraging the identity fabric and existing MFA services to dynamically grant access to assets that were previously difficult to secure. Without requiring Jump Servers or changes to business workflows, modern microsegmentation dramatically simplifies just-in-time MFA. 

In contrast, legacy microsegmentation implementations typically rely on software firewalls to divide the network into small segments. These older solutions require labor-intensive, manual configurations that are complex to deploy and require specialized, ongoing management.  

As microsegmentation evolves, network security mindsets are shifting, too. Today, nine out of ten cyber professionals say Zero Trust is key to improving their overall security posture – and for good reason.  

Why Is Achieving a Zero Trust Mindset Important?  

As ransomware attacks double, networks expand, and hidden cyber risks run rampant, the Zero Trust principle of “never trust, always verify” has never been more relevant. As one security leader put it, “Zero Trust is a necessity now instead of a nice to have.” 

Over two-thirds of breaches involved a non-malicious human element in 2024 – like a person falling victim to a social engineering attack – underscoring the reality that hackers don’t break in, they log in. With this understanding of the modern threat landscape, it’s time to embrace a Zero Trust mindset and focus on cyber resilience, protecting business continuity and minimizing the impact when a breach inevitably occurs. 

Assume Breach: Maximize Resilience to Minimize Impact 

When 75% of organizations have suffered at least one ransomware attack in recent years, it’s time to face the facts: breaches will occur.  

As Dr. Chase Cunningham pointed out in our webinar Easier Than Ever: Building a Cyber Resilient Architecture with Microsegmentation, organizations are now more aware of the cyber threats they’re facing – and willing to invest in solving them – but many haven’t yet shifted mindsets:  

“They’re still not accepting that breach is an inevitability and they're not applying controls to limit the scope of the breach, if you will. And I think that's where we get a lot of this wrong. I tell people all the time when I'm talking Zero Trust: accept breach … Being able to understand that the compromise will come … that's just what has to happen, and then you deal with the place that you can control.”  

Once you adopt that mentality, you can shift your focus to constructing an orchestrated environment that contains breaches effectively. 

How Microsegmentation Creates Built-in Zero Trust  

Microsegmentation has been hailed by MITRE, Gartner, the NSA, Dark Reading, Forbes, and CSO Online as the most promising solution for building a cyber resilient architecture that blocks ransomware, halts lateral movement, and satisfies zero trust guidelines. Nearly 70% of security leaders agree that microsegmentation is very important or essential for achieving Zero Trust.  

Because microsegmentation establishes separate security zones requiring authorization and authentication for access, the Zero Trust principle of least access is embedded into a microsegmented network’s architecture.  

Additionally, since microsegmentation blocks lateral movement to immediately contain breaches, this strategy aligns perfectly with the modern Zero Trust mindset that accepts breaches as inevitable.  

Microsegmentation Benefits and Use Cases 

There’s a reason 74% of security leaders say microsegmentation is important for boosting cyber defenses. In dynamic modern environments, microsegmentation enables more proactive network security.  

Resilient, Zero Trust Architecture  

By isolating every asset with microsegmentation, organizations accelerate Zero Trust initiatives and build resilient networks underpinned by least-privilege security principles. This architecture enables granular access controls and greatly shrinks the attack surface of any breach.  

Immediate Incident Response  

Microsegmentation makes it possible to identify, contain, and mitigate many of the root causes that originate a breach, translating to seamless operational continuity while minimizing the blast radius of security incidents.  

Accelerate Compliance with Microsegmentation  

As regulatory and insurance requirements evolve, microsegmentation simplifies achieving and maintaining compliance by enabling organizations to continuously ensure the resilience of their information systems.  

Top Challenges with Implementing Microsegmentation 

Despite microsegmentation’s clear value for progressing Zero Trust and modernizing network security, just 5% of security leaders say they’re microsegmenting their networks today. According to The Role of Network Segmentation in Zero Trust Architectures: A Survey of IT and Security Professionals from ViB Tech, there are a range of implementation challenges to blame for this divide between value and implementation.  

The top reported concerns with implementing microsegmentation are implementation complexity (40%), disruption to existing operations (37%), and dealing with legacy applications (34%).  

Notably, the top concerns reported with implementing microsegmentation echo legacy implementation challenges that modern solutions sidestep. For example, with automated microsegmentation solutions, concerns about implementation complexity are moot since implementations no longer rely on impossible-to-scale manual configurations.  

The Zero Difference: Microsegmentation Made Easy 

While Zero Trust guidance from the National Security Agency (NSA) suggests microsegmentation is only possible for the most mature organizations, the NSA is wrong.  

The NSA’s advice to map data flows, complete rough segmentation, and carry out several other steps before finally microsegmenting on the road to Zero Trust assumes that the technology hasn’t advanced beyond legacy microsegmentation solutions – but it has.  

As Zero Networks’ CEO and Co-founder, Benny Lakunishok, put it in an interview with the Risky Business News podcast, “Let's say there is a universe that this is done in a click, that you click, learn, and it's segmented without doing anything. Let's assume that such vendors exist. If you do that, why not do that first? Because if you do that first, you don’t care about rough segmentation ... Everything is now isolated.”  

With Zero Networks, organizations can skip the slow, painful journey and achieve holistic segmentation without the manual effort or operational disruption of legacy implementations.  

"What we liked about Zero Networks was the sheer simplicity of how it operates. The product simply works. It's very easy to roll out, very easy to configure, very easy to manage." 

- Israel Bryski, CISO at MIO Partners 

Zero subverts the “crawl, walk, run” approach to microsegmentation and helps organizations skip straight to sprinting with innovative capabilities, including:  

• Comprehensive Discovery, Visibility, and Control: Zero deploys in a click, automatically generating a network asset list before analyzing all network interactions, providing unparalleled visibility with detailed insights into connected devices, their traffic patterns, and vulnerabilities. With Zero’s advanced analytics, organizations can proactively identify and mitigate risks.  
• Automated Tagging, Grouping, and Policy Creation and Management: With the network data gathered in the learning phase of deployment, Zero Networks generates deterministic, fine-grained policies, removing the need for manual labeling, configurations, and rule-setting.  
• Built-in Enforcement of Granular Access Policies: Since Zero Networks automatically segments assets once policies are in place, the platform simplifies compliance with regulatory standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NYDFS, as well as cyber insurance requirements.  
• Seamless Integration with Existing Infrastructure: Zero integrates easily with existing infrastructure and any host-based firewall, so typical network usage patterns remain unaffected. 

Zero Networks’ automation-first approach simplifies microsegmentation, expediting the path to Zero Trust and leaving legacy implementation challenges behind. Request a demo to learn more about how modern microsegmentation works.