Reimagining Cybersecurity: Why Microsegmentation Should Come First

Cyber threats are evolving, and traditional security approaches are struggling to keep up. While 72% of security leaders report increasingly sophisticated cyber risks, just 14% of organizations are confident they have the requisite skills to manage modern threats. In other words, the cybersecurity landscape is necessarily evolving – robust, dynamic network security strategies are more critical than ever.  

In a recent episode of The Phillip Wylie Show, Zero Networks’ VP of Customers, Nicholas DiCola, joined Phillip to discuss microsegmentation, Zero Trust, and the changing cybersecurity space.  

Explore key takeaways from the conversation to find out why microsegmentation no longer needs to sit at the very end of your security roadmap.  

Security Priorities, Skill Gaps, and the Changing Cybersecurity Landscape 

Traditionally, cybersecurity professionals entered the field through military or IT administration roles, but now, paths into security are more diverse – and often, more direct. Many of today’s most experienced cybersecurity leaders did not start their careers on information security teams simply because the private sector’s embrace of cybersecurity is a relatively new development.  

Phillip: “A lot of the older folks that have been in the space longer really got their start in the military because, at one time, there wasn’t really security within organizations. I started as a sys admin back in ’97 and in most companies, it was the network administrators managing firewalls … at one time, it really was only the military practicing any kind of cybersecurity.” 

Though there was no clearly defined entry point for a cybersecurity career just a few decades ago, the landscape is far different today; enrollment in some cybersecurity programs has increased by about 70% in recent years. Still, hands-on, foundational IT knowledge remains critical for effective security implementation – as Nicholas pointed out, networking and systems administration work helps new cyber professionals understand the network and user behavior before trying to secure it.  

Nicholas: “I think some folks don’t necessarily get [the fundamentals] nowadays; they go right into security, which is still good, but I think part of the career progression should be to go sys admin and then move into security, so you get some of those basics first.”  

Despite the rising interest in security roles, many organizations are still suffering from shortages in skilled staff. More than half of the organizations that experienced a data breach in 2024 say they’re facing high levels of security staffing shortage – a 26.2% increase from the prior year.  

Microsegmentation and Zero Trust: How to (Finally) Stop Lateral Movement  

As cyber risks proliferate and many organizations struggle to find enough skilled staff to keep up, Zero Trust has increasingly gained popularity as a leading framework for modern cybersecurity.  

Today, nine out of ten security leaders are leaning on Zero Trust to improve their overall security posture. Meanwhile, nearly 70% agree that microsegmentation is key to achieving Zero Trust.  

Nicholas: “Networks are too open, and accounts are too permissive. Once you’re inside the network, it’s very easy for an attacker to move laterally. How do we stop lateral movement? The root way to stop that is by microsegmenting the network – there were some companies out there that were doing that already, why were they not successful? What’s missing? It’s too hard, it takes too much time.” 

These complex, time-intensive implementations are precisely why just 5% of organizations are microsegmenting their networks today, despite understanding the value.  

Why Traditional Microsegmentation Falls Short 

Many microsegmentation projects stall or fail outright. Why? Because of common challenges with legacy solutions:   

• Manually tagging every asset is time-consuming and labor-intensive; since traditional solutions require manual policy creation, they’re prone to misconfigurations and endless rule tweaking.  
• Poorly configured policies can inadvertently block legitimate traffic, leading to downtime – this risk alone may cause teams to hesitate or abandon microsegmentation projects.  
• Traditional solutions struggle to adapt as environments grow – maintaining and scaling microsegmentation policies manually becomes exponentially harder.  

Nicholas: “Most CISOs move every three to five years on average – they start these projects that don’t even finish by the time the CISO leaves because it just takes a lot of human effort to manage. Some don’t even get to the micro level; they might get some rough network segmentation because that’s the best they can do based on the amount of time it takes.” 

Overcoming Legacy Challenges with Modern Microsegmentation  

While legacy microsegmentation implementations are time-consuming, laborious, and disruptive, modern solutions like Zero Networks feature key differentiators that sidestep the challenges of older tools.  

Nicholas: “We automated building all the rules for the customer – that is the thing that takes the most time for any customer to microsegment a network … we built an automation engine that can do that on thousands of assets at the exact same time, so the customer doesn't have to. That's huge; we save them a ton of time in the ability to do that, and we actually do it without agents.” 

Automated tagging, grouping, and policy creation and management plus a typically agentless approach means modern microsegmentation solutions require minimal time and effort compared to traditional approaches while avoiding the risk of operational disruption.  

Nicholas: “We thought, ‘okay, if I could microsegment, is that going to stop the attacker?’ Yes, mostly, but there's still one other piece that's missing – when attackers get in and they want to laterally move they need privilege on the next machine, so they use things like RDP SSH, WinRM, privileged ports. So, we automatically protect privileged ports by closing them, and we built a patented just-in-time MFA-based feature so that when you want RDP you now MFA, and then you get access temporarily to that asset.”  

The combination of these three differentiators allows Zero to quickly microsegment the entire network and further strengthen security by blocking all privileged access.  

Phillip: “How much time does it save doing it your way as opposed to the legacy type of configuration?”  

Nicholas: “On average, we hear most projects take two to three, even five years; most of our customers are mostly segmented in less than six months.”  

“We’re saving on average 18 to 24 months.”  

- Nicholas DiCola 

Streamlining Cybersecurity Priorities: Accelerate Microsegmentation Maturity  

Many companies view microsegmentation as an "end goal,” only possible for the most mature organizations – those who have dutifully carried out preliminary steps like mapping data flows and completing rough segmentation. But thanks to modern solutions’ advancements, security teams no longer need to push microsegmentation to the end of their security roadmap.  

“I tell people with automation and an agentless capability, microsegmentation doesn't have to be at the end of the road anymore – it can actually now be at the front.” 

- Nicholas DiCola 

Nicholas: “You can gain a very high security posture with very little effort and that changes your timelines because now you can free yourself up to go work on other things. It’s not your legacy microsegmentation that you think, ‘I'm going to spend three years or five years doing this.’ It's now ‘I'm going to spend months doing this.’”  

Phillip: “That's very cool especially, as you mentioned, this being the beginning because then people can put more focus on other areas since they have this level of security posture.” 

Nicholas: “It's super nice because you can add these assets to learning, customers can go work on other things while they're in learning, and then they can come back and do the light review. It's not like, ‘I have to focus on this thing 100% of the time until everything's microsegmented.’ You don't – you can put it in learning, go do some other work, and come back when it's ready to be segmented, so it doesn't take a lot of human time.” 

Zero Networks’ Effortless Microsegmentation 

Security teams no longer have to settle for “good enough” as they pursue a long journey to Zero Trust. Radically simple and powerful in action, Zero Networks’ automated microsegmentation secures your entire network accurately and rapidly – without disrupting operations. Request a demo to see Zero’s set-it-and-forget-it microsegmentation in action.