What is microsegmentation, and do small companies need it?

Microsegmentation means controlling traffic between individual servers or workloads, not only between network zones, so that two servers in the same segment cannot talk to each other unless a rule allows it. It is usually done with host firewalls, hypervisor or cloud security groups, or an agent that enforces policy on each machine. It is very effective against an intruder moving from one server to the next, and common in data centres and cloud environments. Most small companies get more from ordinary segmentation first: separate networks for guests, devices, users and servers. If you run many servers, the inexpensive version of microsegmentation is to switch on each server's own firewall and allow only the connections it needs. Whatever you choose, let real traffic guide the rules. The NetSenX network map shows which hosts talk to which on monitored segments, on every plan, and lateral movement alerts show sessions that do not match a host's normal.

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