Best Practices and Tips for Network Segmentation

As cyber-attacks become more and more sophisticated and frequent, security practitioners are realizing the value of network segmentation as a key defense-in-depth security strategy. In fact, they are even beginning to go a step further and are contemplating the pros and cons of micro-segmentation within the data center.

With proper network segmentation you minimize the level of access to sensitive information for those applications, servers, and people who don’t need it, while enabling access for those that do. Yet it’s no surprise that maintaining effective network segmentation is hard and adds complexity to an already complex environment. So in this new educational video, Professor Wool provides practical recommendations for how to design your network for optimal segmentation in two typical scenarios:

• Allowing traffic from an external partner application into the corporate data center
• Structuring network traffic flows within the data center to force specific flows with more check points for better security

Network segmentation helps prevent single point of failure. Once unauthorized access is gained, network segmentation can provide effective controls to mitigate the next step of a network intrusion and to limit further movement across the network or propagation of a threat. Enjoy the video!

Each Professor Wool educational video examines a core challenge and provides technical tips for managing security policies in evolving enterprise networks and data centers. See the complete Professor Wool series here.