What is Micro-Segmentation?

Micro-segmentation is an emerging IT security best practice of implementing granular isolation (segmentation) policies between data center workloads.

Micro-segmentation is a key tenant of the Zero Trust model that recommends workloads are isolated from one another to enhance security and simplify policy management. Once an attacker penetrates a security perimeter, there are generally fewer internal controls to restrict lateral (east-west) movement. Micro-segmentation can help prevent a bad actor from gaining a foothold on one trusted resource and using that position to exploit other resources. This approach becomes increasingly important for cloud resources, since these are often shared by workloads of different criticalities and/or different customers.

Another advantage of microsegmentation is that things like access control lists, routing rules and firewall policies can be attached to specific workloads and automatically propagated when more of those same types of workloads are created.