5 Network Segmentation Best Practices to Level Up

In today’s world, with the advancement of technology, digitalization is becoming more and more widespread. From the activities of businesses to education, almost everything takes place in digital environments. Especially with the transition of companies to remote working, the need for computing systems that provide security and protection in digital environments has increased.

According to research, remote workforce security, which is the most important thing to be provided in remote work, has become the most important challenge with the deployment of new collaboration tools. Ensuring network security and keeping its performance high at all times is very important in terms of business continuity and effectiveness.

At this point, it will be quite useful to make a segmentation in terms of ensuring cyber security and preventing malicious activities. Better access to the corporate network and endpoint security will be achieved through network segmentation best practices.

What Are The Best Network Segmentation Practices?

Network segmentation is a crucial part that plays a major role in providing secure entry and access to the network environment. It aims to provide security at every step that takes place within the network by dividing the network into smaller sub-sections.

With regards to cybersecurity, network segmentation improves security by controlling and monitoring traffic between parts of the entire network. To take advantage of network segmentation, you can set your segmentation policy and start with the best 5 practices below.

Limitation of third-part access

Organizations collaborate with multiple third-party external vendors and service providers to meet some of the needs. In the process of collaboration, although the company is performing activities that will not require access to its back-end systems, there will be a need for some access at some point.

The recommended strategy for network segmentation, in this case, is to construct separate access portals to service each provider. In this manner, if a vendor is unluckily compromised, the attackers will be unable to access your systems.

Network performance and reliability

The company’s network performance should always be kept at a high level when deploying network segmentation. In order to avoid dealing with contemporary, dynamic intranet traffic, network segmentation must be correctly performed and improve network performance, as opposed to the adverse impact. Even though maintaining policy enforcement across several segments, ensuring reliability, and consistent performance is essential.

Check the network regularly

You should always isolate and protect your network effectively. Planning and implementing frequent network audits, such as risk assessment, both protect your assets and play a large role in identifying threats and vulnerabilities. Segmentation controls are tested in situ using penetration testing, which also reveals additional ways a hostile actor can access systems and data.

Avoid over-segmentation

While controlling and securing assets with network segmentation may seem beneficial, doing too much segmentation can lead to some inconveniences. If your corporate company network is segmented more than above the required level, it can be difficult to control each of them.

At the same time, this situation may decrease the working performance of the network and reduce the productivity of the employees. Therefore, you should examine and evaluate each segment in detail and keep these network segments in balance.

Unification of network resources

Another best practice of network segmentation is to combine network resources under one roof. Although we are talking about segmenting the network, by combining similar network resources that may fall into the same category in a database, you can quickly enforce your security policies and protect your extra sensitive data more securely.

What Are The Network Segmentation Benefits?

Network segmentation has many more benefits within the network than you might imagine. It has various benefits for the entire network, from data privacy to secure access, from cost reduction to better defense against attacks. Here are some of these benefits.

Preventing cyber attacks and minimizing damage

Since segmentation divides networks, you can limit the regions where the attack can spread if an attack occurs on any network. In this way, any system other than the network part that is attacked remains safe.

Cyber threats are increasing and becoming a bigger concern than before. With threat vectors spreading, zero trust security is now more a necessity rather than a recommendation.

To close down your security gaps, there are multiple solutions you can apply to do just that. Here are a few:

Minimizing compliance coverage

By limiting the number of in-scope systems, segmentation lowers the expense of regulatory compliance. Segmentation, for instance, separates payment processing systems from those that do not. In this way, costly compliance standards and audit procedures are limited to in-scope systems rather than the entire network.

Managing internal threats and attacks

A defense mechanism around your network can be very effective at detecting and taking action against external threats and attacks. However, with network segmentation, you have more visibility and the ability to manage to identify access restrictions and internal threats and attacks.

Better defense

Although your organization’s firewalls play a major role in managing the process in terms of cybersecurity, they may not be sufficient to prevent or identify threats in the mouth of the company.

Network segmentation is highly effective in detecting and rapidly responding to emerging threats by establishing barriers between your existing business assets and external factors.

Strengthening network performance

Network segmentation, when implemented completely correctly, allows the network and its intranet to be segmented into defined segments. This increases the performance of your network and greatly reduces network congestion.

Conclusion

You can see the effect of network segmentation in many cases such as ensuring cybersecurity, smooth running of business activities, preventing cyber attacks, and applying the right recovery plans in possible situations. Acquiring one of the types of network segmentation not only keeps the network secure but can also have performance-enhancing effects.

Maintaining and tracking the flow of traffic on your network can be complex and challenging at times and can be challenging. Precisely at this point, it is crucial to divide the network into manageable segments thanks to network segmentation, since several endpoints are connected with network access. In this way, you can not only monitor processes more efficiently but also have great effects on network security and protection.

5 Network Segmentation Best Practices to Level Up