Whether a company utilizes a private, hybrid or public cloud infrastructure or offers cloud services to others, it is critical that each cloud instance and service be isolated to help minimize the risk of data compromise. In a traditional network, networking equipment and firewalls segment and isolate physical servers and other devices. However, to effectively isolate cloud instances, technologies like micro-segmentation are needed.
Micro-segmentation can help minimize damage caused by a compromised cloud asset. It can reduce the severity to a contained incident that can be remediated quickly versus an expansive data breach that spans multiple parts of the business, or numerous clients in a multi-tenant service. While proper implementation of micro-segmentation is vital, at a high-level view it can be summarized as a 5-step process.