Easier than Ever: Building a Cyber Resilient Architecture with Microsegmentation

Summary

Security budgets keep growing, yet breaches rose about 660% from 2021 to 2024, because organizations over-invested in visibility and response instead of limiting the blast radius when a breach happens. In this webinar, Dr. Chase Cunningham, known as Dr. Zero Trust, and Zero Networks customer engineer António Vasconcelos explain why accepting breach and building cyber resilience through segmentation is the practical path to zero trust. Drawing on survey data, they cover why most microsegmentation projects stall, how regulators and cyber insurers increasingly expect segmentation, and how automated, agentless microsegmentation with just-in-time MFA makes it achievable in months rather than years.

Key takeaways

• Nearly all survey respondents rate zero trust as extremely or very important, and only about 10% dismiss it, a reversal from five years ago.
• Breaches rose about 660% from 2021 to 2024 despite rising budgets, and initial data compromise often happens in under 24 hours, faster than most teams can detect and respond.
• Accepting breach means designing for containment, like a ship’s watertight compartments, rather than relying on perfect prevention.
• Regulators, such as HHS in its proposed HIPAA update, and cyber insurers increasingly expect segmentation and dynamic controls; point-in-time compliance breaks as soon as the environment changes.
• Survey respondents overwhelmingly see microsegmentation as important, yet only 12% have implemented it with satisfactory results, because legacy projects can run for years and still cover a fraction of assets.
• Zero Networks uses deterministic automation, agentless deployment based on native telemetry, and patented just-in-time MFA from layer 3 to layer 7, helping organizations move from multi-year projects to less than six months.

This webinar was recorded in January 2025. Statistics cited reflect that time.

[00:00] Moderator: Welcome. We’re so excited to have you today to talk about how to build a cyber resilient architecture with microsegmentation. Many of the data points in this presentation come from a recent survey we conducted. With that, I’ll pass it over to our presenters, António and Chase. Please introduce yourselves.

[01:02] António Vasconcelos, Customer Engineer, Zero Networks: Thank you very much, Beth. I’m António. I’m Portuguese, based in Lisbon, which is rainy today but usually very sunny and lovely. I’ve worked as a customer engineer at Zero Networks for more than a year, and I’ve been in IT security, or cyber, as it’s now called, for a couple of decades. It’s a pleasure to be here with Chase to talk about zero trust, cyber resilience, and microsegmentation.

[01:33] Dr. Chase Cunningham, aka Dr. Zero Trust: Thanks for having me on. I have a podcast called Dr. Zero Trust, and I do a lot of work in the security space. I appreciate you having me, especially since we have data to work from, so it’s not just pontification.

[02:03] António Vasconcelos: We like to be factual. And Chase and I agreed to keep this super interactive and unscripted, so we invite everyone to chime in with questions and what’s top of mind. This is for all of us to share perspectives and learn.

How long have we been talking about zero trust, and what does it mean?

[02:35] António Vasconcelos: Let’s begin with a data point from our survey, where we asked about the importance of zero trust for improving overall security posture. It’s very clear that nearly everyone says it’s either extremely important or very important. Chase, how long have we been talking about zero trust?

[03:05] Chase Cunningham: If you really go all the way back, John Kindervag references a Rudyard Kipling poem from the early 1900s, so conceptually we’ve been talking about it for over a hundred years. In cyber specifically, realistically about the last 15. So it’s taken about a century and 15 years to catch up, but progress is progress. And if you look at this data, only about 10% of the people you surveyed said they’re not doing anything with zero trust and it doesn’t make sense to them. Five years ago, it would have been pretty much the other side of the coin. If you put a hundred people in a room and asked them to define zero trust, you’d get a hundred different answers, which is actually a good thing. You should have your own definition and your own strategy. There’s no gospel, no matter what people tell you about “thou shalt only do zero trust this way.”

[04:40] António Vasconcelos: You got ahead of my question about what zero trust means to you. As you said, every organization will have a different perspective based on its own risk appetite and risk vectors. But do you think zero trust is being subverted as a term? Nothing against marketing teams, but I think it’s often used in ways that aren’t its original intent.

[05:11] Chase Cunningham: That’s the double-edged sword of real strategy. The moment everybody gravitates toward something because it works, there are sharks in the water who say, “We do that too,” and make their own diluted version of it. The good news is that there’s a lot of valid, long-term academic research on this. The Cloud Security Alliance publishes on it, and books have been written about it. It isn’t two or three people saying, “This is zero trust, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.” It’s an academically researched area of security. And honestly, I’m kind of glad there are still 10% who say zero trust isn’t a thing. The world needs slow gazelles. The doubters can keep doubting, because the lions are waiting in the weeds for them.

Why are breaches rising even as security budgets grow?

[06:42] António Vasconcelos: Let’s go to some facts, using publicly available data from sources like Gartner, IT Governance, and IBM, which publishes an amazing data breach report every year. Fortunately, investment in cyber and business risk has grown over the last couple of years. Boards, the C-level, and management now understand that cyber and business risk should be top of mind, and it’s important to give people the eggs to make the omelets. Five or 10 years ago, it was very hard for a CISO to get budget for business risk reduction.

[07:47] António Vasconcelos: What we’d expect, as budgets keep increasing, is for data breaches to go down. Unfortunately, it’s a dystopian relationship. Not only has the cost increased, because organizations are more digital by the day, but we still see something like a 660% increase in data breaches from 2021 to 2024. So zero trust is important, investment in resilience is important, and budgets are increasing. What are we doing wrong?

[08:18] Chase Cunningham: I don’t think we’re doing much wrong. I think there’s been growth among small and midsize businesses that are now required to do things in cybersecurity. Reporting has increased, compliance initiatives have increased, and there’s a larger pool to draw from. Much of the growth in spending is coming from SMBs that have finally realized they have to do something about cyber, because they’re the ones getting hit. Major enterprises have, to a degree, leveled up on the simpler problems, though they still get hit by complex APT attacks, and you’re never going to beat an APT.

[09:19] Chase Cunningham: What also stands out is that the number of records and the duration of compromise are the same as they were years ago, and that’s the real problem. We’re spending more money and people are aware, but they still aren’t accepting that breaches are inevitable, and they aren’t applying controls to limit the scope of a breach. That’s where we get a lot wrong. When I talk about zero trust, and John Kindervag says it too, I tell people to accept breach. Thinking you’ll have a perfect security posture and never be compromised is like thinking you’ll never pay taxes. The compromise will come, and the very nature of technology means someone will find a way to reverse-engineer or break it. Then you deal with the places you can control. One concept that gets lost in conversations about cybersecurity and cyber warfare is contested space. Contested space will always exist, and as long as you accept that and work where you can gain ground, things get better.

Did the industry over-invest in visibility and response?

[10:52] António Vasconcelos: Living in that assume-breach mindset is important. But I believe organizations, sometimes without realizing it, overpivoted toward visibility and response, and didn’t complete the full circle of what everyone now calls cyber resilience: learning from the attack vectors and areas where we have the most exposure, and minimizing them as much as possible. Ideally we mitigate, but if not, it’s a balance of risk appetite, investment, and time. Do you think we collectively overpivoted into visibility and response and forgot prevention, or resilience, because it was hard?

[11:54] Chase Cunningham: I think we did pivot heavily into identification and awareness, and that didn’t make much of a difference. That’s why the SIEM market took off like a bottle rocket for a long time and has pretty well stalled out over the last several years. Not to knock the whole space, but SIEM as awareness is like going to the doctor, being told your test results are bad, and then the doctor walks out. Hang on, what’s my treatment plan? Do I have cancer or high cholesterol? That’s where the value proposition actually lines up. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know what’s going on. You absolutely should. But there’s a lot of value in context, application, control, and resilience, instead of just seeing all the blinky lights.

[12:25] António Vasconcelos: And that’s often our collective fault. I’ve worked for vendors for many years, and we like to focus on the shiny stuff. Visibility is important, and being able to contain and respond is important, but what else do you do with it? I love the health analogy, because ideally you want those data points as early as possible so you can proactively work on habits like nutrition to prevent problems from occurring. We told ourselves it would be super hard to look into the unknown unknowns, so we assumed breach and focused on detection, detection, detection, and responding as quickly as possible.

[13:25] António Vasconcelos: Reports from CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and the other big vendors are fascinating. APTs are table stakes now; cybercrime groups have software-as-a-service tools to automate everything, and they might be a small operation, not a government-funded group. We still see roughly the same average number of days to detect a breach, but the initial compromise and breach of data can take less than 24 hours in 50% or more of data breaches. That’s mind-boggling, and it shows that even if you invest heavily in identification, discovery, and containment, it’s very, very hard to beat less than 24 hours.

[14:28] Chase Cunningham: If you accept that you’re dealing with cybercrime, compare it to physical crime. If someone breaks into my house, they don’t get to move in and live there. I want them to steal what they’ll steal and get out, and then make sure they can’t do it again. That’s what we’re trying to get to.

How does proper architecture limit the blast radius of an attacker already inside?

[14:59] Chase Cunningham: We have a question from the audience: given the idea of contested space, with record cyber spending and 2025 already shaping up to be a crazy year for breaches and attacks, how can defense in depth, zero trust, and proper segmentation help mitigate the threat, rather than just buying another tool? How does proper architecture limit the blast radius of an adversary who’s already present?

[15:30] António Vasconcelos: I love this. Another tool, another hype cycle. Eventually, someone will give you an LLM to fix all your problems.

[15:30] Chase Cunningham: If you put AI on it, it’s fixed automatically. It’s a really good question. The crux is that if your architecture is accurate and segmentation is where it’s supposed to be, then it’s what we called watertight integrity in the Navy: a missile can hit the ship and it still stays afloat. You’re not the Titanic, where one compartment floods, everybody drowns, and we end up with a bad Leo DiCaprio movie. Architecture and segmentation should provide that control.

[16:31] António Vasconcelos: I love that analogy, because it takes us to the next step. When you build a business, nobody wants IT or technology to be a friction point. You want everyone to be productive, collaborate, and innovate as seamlessly as possible. So when organizations define their architecture, nobody thinks upfront about microsegmenting things, partly because of the tools that have been available, and because it seems to get in the way of their goals. But organizations like MITRE, which unfortunately also had a breach recently, pointed out that most of these breaches could have been prevented with microsegmentation. Networks are too open, and accounts are too permissive.

[17:34] António Vasconcelos: I’m not being mean, but this is often a question of quality more than cybersecurity: cyber quality. The processes, what can and can’t be done, and the right tools to support people and processes need to be in place, the sooner the better. If not, you need to focus on the elements with the biggest return on investment for mitigating the risks we’re all going to face. Microsegmentation isn’t a silver bullet, and it’s important to say that, but in terms of return on investment, it’s definitely one of the biggest on the table.

[18:04] Chase Cunningham: Network segmentation and isolation kind of stalled out 10 years ago. Everybody got their CCNA certification, and we said, “We’ve segmented everything, because we’re all certified.” We had firewalls and segments, and that was as far as it went, and then we prayed the electrons kept moving between this thing and that thing without anyone complaining. But that’s exactly what attackers leverage. When you start microsegmenting, you’re whittling down where you should have kept going 10 or more years ago, because a lot of those things never needed to be accessible from where they could be accessed. If you’re worried about people complaining or bricking something, those are valid concerns. But I’ve seen organizations start microsegmenting, turn things off, and if nobody complains, you didn’t need it. I have four kids. When they start griping after I turn something off, I know I have to turn it back on. If nobody complains, it stays off. That’s how we need to think about this.

How are regulators and compliance frameworks driving segmentation?

[19:36] António Vasconcelos: Governments, regulations, compliance requirements, and security frameworks internationally have started focusing on cyber resilience: reducing the blast radius and making sure we can contain things upfront, rather than waiting for a huge blast and then trying to evict attackers from our house. I like this proposed HIPAA update from HHS, which makes segmentation core to the update. Segmentation shouldn’t stop at the VLAN or the perimeter firewall; it should extend to applications, workloads, and individual assets. To paraphrase, HHS said most breaches in the healthcare industry could have been prevented with segmentation. What’s your take?

[21:08] Chase Cunningham: I’m always glad when people come up with logical, common-sense approaches and put out regulations that might help. Hospitals, manufacturing organizations, and IoT and OT environments are great places where segmentation can be very clear, and you apply rules based on the needs of each area. The pharmacy shouldn’t have a default rule to talk to HR; that’s a risk you don’t need. I read through the language, and I’m glad it focuses on architecture, rather than “if they get your data, it’s a HIPAA fine of X, Y, and Z,” because all of our data has already been compromised one way or another, and that hasn’t made much difference. Saying that you need logical rules that enable segmented networks, which is what networks are supposed to be, is a common-sense, smart approach.

Why isn’t point-in-time compliance enough?

[22:39] António Vasconcelos: Agreed. It comes back to that mindset shift toward quality, building from the ground up whether you’re a new organization or an established one, because investing in resilience is key to business continuity. And then there’s this hot take we discussed earlier: the notion that compliance is a snapshot in time that’s forever applicable. “I’m compliant, so I’m safe and secure.” We know it’s not that easy. What’s your take?

[23:09] Chase Cunningham: I strong-armed Zero Networks into including this, so don’t hate on them. The truth is that if you’re not segmented correctly, not microsegmented, and it’s not dynamic, you’re not compliant, because changes occur. You’re in a digital system: people do different things, networks move, and infrastructure bursts and goes away. There’s no way to stay compliant and do business legally without segmentation that supports how compliance is supposed to work. If you got that nifty compliance sticker that says you’re ISO 27001 and everything else, the moment someone moves an electron to a different spot, your compliance is invalidated. You need segmentation, isolation, dynamic controls, and a policy engine that can do this at scale. And if any auditors are listening, ask the people you audit how they enable dynamic segmentation and isolation for their compliance initiatives. If the answer is “I don’t know,” that’s the problem.

[24:41] António Vasconcelos: That’s the point I focus on with my own customers. Dynamic means following the growth and change of the business, which happen daily: the network changes, applications come and go, and new requirements and regulations arrive. Technology needs to support that, but people and processes need to work in tandem with it. A microsegmentation tool can save you all day, but if you push applications into a highly controlled, microsegmented production environment without even an architecture document defining what should and shouldn’t be open, you’re doing it wrong. You’re offloading that responsibility to the technology alone, which shouldn’t happen.

[25:11] Chase Cunningham: And if you’re segmented correctly, especially the more segmentation you apply, you’ll be compliant for the things that are actually required. If you read through the language, it never says your network should be compliant. It says the data you hold and the things inside your applications should be set up in a compliant manner, and you do that with isolation and segmentation. If your policy engine enables that at scale, you don’t need everything to be compliant all the time, which is impossible anyway.

[26:11] António Vasconcelos: Focus on what matters. In cyber, we should think more about business quality and process quality. How can I be as effective as possible and deliver the biggest return on investment with the shortest time to value, knowing that trying to put everything under the compliance hat isn’t possible, especially for larger, more complex organizations? Sustainability has to be top of mind when we choose a strategy, technology, and processes. The biggest challenge I see is maintaining it and keeping it operational for the foreseeable future. Implementation day is great, but then the real challenges arrive.

[27:46] Chase Cunningham: You nailed it. What stands out to me is the question that keeps appearing on that graphic: why? That’s the question that has to be answered. Why is this occurring? Why are we doing it? Why are we putting effort where we are, and why are we budgeting for it? If you can’t answer that clearly, you need to figure out why.

How can microsegmentation reduce the burden of vulnerability and patch management?

[28:17] António Vasconcelos: I love this practical mind map for vulnerability and patch management. There’s a zero-day. Why? Because someone discovered it, and the software is vulnerable. Why are we affected? Because the service is open, and we need the application open. But why is it open to everyone? Why does it need to be open from a network perspective to everyone in the first place? Why not find a better way to minimize its exposure, so you don’t have to rush to patch it immediately because it’s exposed? Those five whys, from the Toyota approach to solving root causes, apply here: if I have this vulnerability, can I mitigate it by minimizing its exposure? Can we change the design or behavior to work around the problem, instead of doing vulnerability and patch management day in and day out, which is the reactive way of doing things?

How can microsegmentation help when DLP fails?

[30:19] Chase Cunningham: We have a couple of audience questions. One audience member mentions a healthcare breach last year that totaled about six terabytes, where DLP never fired and the attacker used a poorly configured 2FA client. How could microsegmentation have helped? The moment you say “poorly configured 2FA client,” that pretty much lines up the answer. With segmentation and isolation done correctly, tied into IAM and a well-configured access management protocol, the damage would have been minimized. As for DLP, I think everyone would pretty much agree that it never really worked. DLP isn’t going to stop much.

How do you win budget for segmentation?

[31:23] Chase Cunningham: The other question is about changing mindsets and budgets: how do we win people over? In my experience, when you say, “We need to be more secure,” most people say, “Sure, I agree.” When you say, “We could get compromised,” they say, “Yes, we’re worried about that.” But when you say, “We have a legal requirement to change how we do things, because the current approach is detrimental to our business and increases our risk,” suddenly the budget conversation changes. Have that conversation in terms of risk, business, and legal requirements, rather than cyber, hacking, and hooded figures in a basement. The people who cut budgets aren’t cyber people, so you have to speak their language. CISOs report to the CEO, the CFO, and the board, and when those people are in a room drinking coffee, the decision comes down to risk, business objectives, and keeping the business viable. If you talk about that, the budget conversation will change.

[32:23] António Vasconcelos: We could do a separate webinar on being a business CISO who talks business. The CISO is a business enabler, and cyber is a business enabler. If I can get you compliant with X, Y, and Z, and with A, B, and C in a different region, industry, or market, I’m giving you the ability to expand your business in ways you couldn’t before. But we have to pitch that ourselves, and we collectively need to train ourselves to speak the language of the business, because the CISO is a business executive, and that’s often forgotten.

[33:26] Chase Cunningham: Another audience member made a great point: her magic wand would be to have the rest of the C-suite understand that they’re not just a healthcare business, but an IT business as well. The more we do with connected devices, biometrics, and everything else we’re innovating on, the more healthcare becomes an IT business.

[33:56] António Vasconcelos: Business in general will always become more digital and more interconnected; there’s no way around it. So when we think about business risk, it isn’t just earthquakes, fires, or a stock market crash. It’s cyber risk too.

Why do microsegmentation projects stall?

[34:27] António Vasconcelos: Let’s talk about microsegmentation as the emerging solution. In our survey, we asked about the importance of microsegmentation for cyber defense: 55% said very important, and 19% said extremely important. No argument there. But this is where things break down between aspirations and what’s actually achievable day to day. When we asked organizations about the status of their microsegmentation projects, 33% were considering an implementation, 17% were planning one, and only 12% had implemented it with satisfactory results. Another 20% understood the need and importance but had concerns about implementing it: “I’m going to break my business. It’s going to make my life miserable.” For most organizations I talk to, the first thing their brain associates with microsegmentation is pain, because of how things have gone over the past couple of decades: never-ending deployments.

[36:01] António Vasconcelos: It’s a mix of strategy, planning, and technology. Technology is the enabler, but if the strategy, planning, and value drivers are right, it gets better, and I’ll explain how we make it better. I see this every day: organizations set out to microsegment everything, and after a year or two, they’ve covered 20% or 30% of the estate they originally targeted. So they shrink their scope and success metrics just to say they accomplished something. Last year, I talked to the head of security at a healthcare organization whose C-level said, “This is no longer sustainable. We can’t fund this project anymore.” After three years, they had microsegmented 40% of their assets, and only virtual servers, with no end in sight. They were still in day-zero implementation and hadn’t reached day-two operations: keeping the lights on and making it an integral part of the business. So the bigger challenge is that technology hasn’t enabled organizations to be confident in succeeding with microsegmentation: low return on investment, projects that take longer than the average CISO’s tenure, and a strong association with pain.

[38:02] Chase Cunningham: What stands out is that nine out of 10 don’t fully implement, and that it takes longer than the average CISO’s tenure. You’re lucky if you keep a CISO for a couple of years, for a lot of reasons. We deal too much in absolutes, like the Sith in Star Wars. If you’re looking for complete certainty on everything, that’s not how it works. Explain to people, “We started at level zero and were completely exposed. Now we’re at level three and 50% more secure.” There’s benefit in that progress. Your network wasn’t built in a day; it was built over the lifetime of your business, and it keeps growing, so you have to stick with it. Exposed common attack ports are a very solvable problem with one click and a good policy engine. The ways around this exist, but it’s interesting to see people still stuck on the idea of pressing a button and having everything be perfect.

[39:36] António Vasconcelos: I won’t lie: we make it much easier than what people have tried before. But to your point, this is a long-run strategy. When we come into the picture, technology often stops being the blocker, and change management becomes the blocker: changing your business, operations, and processes, and re-educating people on how things are done, to adapt to the new strategy and goal of microsegmentation.

What does microsegmentation solve?

[40:09] António Vasconcelos: Briefly, on the segmentation maturity model: everyone should have perimeter firewalls, and medium- to high-maturity organizations will have VLANs, ACLs, and segmentation firewalls across several parts of the network. But isolating groups of assets, applications, and workloads, and reaching the holistic level, where applications, assets, and identities come together, is uncommon, because effort and cost go through the roof. You spend years trying to achieve something without being able to finish it and keep it aligned with continuous business changes.

[41:11] António Vasconcelos: What microsegmentation solves: anything focused on resilience gives you a bigger blueprint for zero trust and brings you closer to your own vision of it, since zero trust means different things to different organizations. Microsegmentation is another step in that staircase. It supports operational and business continuity, because it reduces the blast radius of bad things that happen, limiting their exposure and damage so they become incidents rather than data breaches. And it’s an enabler of the ongoing compliance your organization needs.

[42:11] Chase Cunningham: And on your point about cyber insurance requirements: we all have to deal with it. Cyber insurance companies are starting to ask, “Can you show us a network map? An architectural diagram? Can you verify that you have controls in place before we issue this policy?” For a long time, they threw policies at the wall to see what stuck, then took the losses on the far end. In the very near future, you’ll need to show them what controls you’ve put in place. The good news is that the more architected, well-designed, and deployed your controls are, the better position you’re in to argue for a better policy or a lower premium.

How does Zero Networks make microsegmentation achievable?

[43:11] António Vasconcelos: So how do we do this? As a company, we focus on building technology for organizations of any size, from the smallest to the largest, that’s easy to implement, maintain, and operate, with very short time to value, because microsegmentation needs to show value as soon as possible, or it becomes another project in a drawer. For microsegmentation to actually happen, it can’t depend entirely on people knowing their applications, traffic flows, and requirements. We’d all love a world where everything is documented, but it doesn’t happen. So we built something that provides deterministic knowledge of what exists, what needs to be allowed, and what needs to communicate between assets, workloads, and applications, and bootstraps all of that knowledge for you, without venturing into anomaly detection, so the output can be trusted. Trust is key for any automation, especially in microsegmentation, where people worry about applying controls at scale because of business continuity.

[44:42] António Vasconcelos: We’ve cracked that recipe. In proofs of value, we’ve seen organizations go from expecting a one-, two-, or even three-year project to finishing in less than six months. That’s gigantic, and it’s customers saying it, not me; you can see their testimonials on our website. Second, we’re agentless, because deployment has to be frictionless. We give you immediate visibility and auditing without intercepting traffic or deploying agents across your assets and network. On top of that data, our automation engine immediately starts building access rules, so you can see what will be applied if and when an asset goes into segmentation, with full control over everything.

[45:46] António Vasconcelos: Last but not least, to the earlier question about the client and 2FA: it isn’t just 2FA for applications. We can overlay just-in-time MFA on anything on the network, from layer 3 to layer 7, without jump boxes, agents, or changes to end users’ or applications’ workflows. That’s gigantic, it’s unique to us, and we have a patent for it. It makes microsegmentation possible for use cases that change daily, like IT operations, SecOps, and DevOps. Instead of static ACLs, we bring identity into access policies in real time, using the MFA you already have in your organization.

[46:46] António Vasconcelos: Microsegmentation helps tremendously with business enablement, whether that’s higher compliance, lower insurance premiums, or faster change control. One customer told us they had about 40 changes every single day on their global firewall. By distributing those controls to individual assets, applications, and workloads, they became much more nimble and agile and reduced the hours spent on global firewall changes that could impact the entire business and network. So microsegmentation drives agility and cost efficiency while reducing risk to a level you probably haven’t seen before, down to user, process, port, protocol, and asset-to-asset, giving you truly holistic microsegmentation.

[48:17] Chase Cunningham: You’ve laid out how you do what you do, and I think folks should give you a shot to see how it works. The proof is in the pudding. You can tell me all day long, but when the customer says it, it’s a different story.

How does Zero Networks see traffic without agents or traffic interception?

[48:17] Chase Cunningham: An audience member asks what inputs you consume, since there’s no agent and no traffic interception. How does it work?

[48:49] António Vasconcelos: We consume the native information that operating systems and network appliances in your environment already provide. We tap into that telemetry with minimal impact on assets and no agent deployment whatsoever, just plugging into the native components you already have. And we use those same native components to enforce the microsegmentation bubbles around each asset, application, and workload.

[50:24] António Vasconcelos: Chase, it was an awesome pleasure talking with you and having you as a partner for this webinar. From our side, we’re always happy to talk with organizations that want to understand what microsegmentation could mean for them and how we can help. Personally, I’d like to help drive change toward a more resilient world, where we spend less time putting out the small fires that happen every day, and the big ones too.

How quickly can microsegmentation contain a breach?

[51:26] Moderator: Thanks, António. I think we have time for one more question.

[51:26] António Vasconcelos: The question is: “I’m very focused on limiting the blast radius of a breach. How can microsegmentation contain a breach quickly?” Chase used the Titanic analogy, which I really enjoyed. If water enters one compartment of a ship and you can isolate it without compromising the remaining compartments, you reduce the blast radius. What we typically see is that lateral movement, from asset to asset or resource to resource, is the bigger challenge for organizations to prevent, because they’re still stuck in the castle-and-moat concept: whatever gets past the perimeter firewall, or connects through the VPN or the physical network, is trusted and allowed to communicate with everything. What we want to do is create virtual barriers inside the network you trust so dearly, limiting what can communicate with what, so damage in one area can’t spread to others.

[53:28] Moderator: Thank you. We had a few other questions in the chat that were mostly comments, so we’ll follow up with folks after the webinar. Thank you, everyone.