What is Network Segmentation?

We all know absolute security is a myth. And many times, even though we try to enforce security to our best, attackers manage to gain unauthorized access to the network. Once they gain unauthorized access to a network, attackers try to move across the network so that they can gain access to the required systems to obtain sensitive data.

So, once the attackers manage to gain unauthorized access to the network despite all the security measures, the best way to thwart them is to restrict their movements across the network. And, that is the main motivation behind network segmentation.

Network segmentation is the splitting of a network into smaller sub-networks, mainly to boost performance and improve security. If attackers gain unauthorized access to a network, network segmentation can limit their further movement across the network.

Advantages of Network Segmentation

There are a number of advantages of using network segmentation. A number of them are mentioned below:

Reducing Congestion

The more the number of devices in a network, the more the collision while transmitting data. And so, if the number of devices in a network keeps increasing, the network’s performance reduces. One way to reduce the collision is to reduce the number of devices in the sub-network so that the chances of collision are reduced.

Using network segmentation, a network can be split into smaller sub-networks, reducing the number of devices in a single sub-network. Thus, there will be less chance of collision within a sub-network, which in turn can increase the network’s performance.

Controlling Network Access

Network segmentation can be used to control what all users should access which part of the network. For example, in an organization, different groups of employees like HR, server administrators, executives, etc, may need to access their own segregated networks. Even third parties also should have their own segregated network so that attackers cannot gain access to sensitive data within the network via a less protected and compromised third-party site.

Network segmentation can be used to segregate a network into different zones so that certain groups of users have access to a certain zone of the network only.

Enforcement of Policy

PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and similar standards provide guidelines for separating cardholders’ data from the rest of the network so that even if a part of the network gets compromised, attackers cannot gain access to cardholders sensitive data so easily. Segmenting the network can provide multiple zones, with varying security levels, which in turn can help in rigorous enforcement of the policy.

Limiting Network Problems

As network segmentation segments the network into different sub-networks, a local failure in one part of the network does not affect the other parts of the network.

Improved Security

As network segmentation controls the access of different network parts, it can restrict attackers’ lateral movement across the network in case they manage to gain …