New report shows enterprises deploying limited segmentation strategies despite 92% of security leaders claiming to believe the technology prevented cyberattacks from causing data breaches
| 15/12/2021 
Guardicore’s founders: Dror Sal’ee, Pavel Gurvich, and Ariel Zeitlin. Photo courtesy Guardicore
According to a new report, “State of Segmentation: Strong Implementations Reap Great Security Awards,” 96% of organizations claim to be implementing segmentation in their networks, yet only 2% of those organizations are segmenting all six mission-critical asset classes, including critical applications, public-facing applications, domain controllers, endpoints, servers, and business critical assets/data, with segmentation.
Conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Guardicore, now part of Akamai, the research surveyed 1,000 IT security decision-makers across seven countries, detailing current trends in segmentation across enterprises and the security advantages associated with strong segmentation implementations.
Guardicore, now part of Akamai, delivers Zero Trust network segmentation to security practitioners across the globe.
Segmentation is an IT approach that separates critical areas of the network to control east-west traffic, prevent lateral movement, and ultimately reduce the attack surface. Traditionally, this is done via an architectural approach - relying on hardware, firewalls and manual work.
This can often prove cumbersome and labor intensive, which is a contributing factor in 82% of respondents saying that network segmentation is a “huge task.” Guardicore’s research finds segmentation strategies are often limited in breadth and depth, in part due to the reasons mentioned above.
Modern segmentation uses a software-based approach that is simpler to use, faster to implement and is able to secure more critical assets. The research shows that organizations that leverage the latest approach to segmentation will realize essential security benefits, like identifying more ransomware attacks and reducing time to mitigate attacks.
“The findings of the report demonstrate just how valuable a strong segmentation strategy can be for organizations looking to reduce their attack surface and stop damaging attacks like ransomware,” said Pavel Gurvich, SVP, Akamai Enterprise Security (former CEO of Guardicore).
“In the past, implementing segmentation on the infrastructure level was difficult, but we see lots of interest in and opportunity for organizations to implement software-based segmentation which significantly simplifies deployment and accelerates projects. Software-based segmentation will be a key security approach in adopting Zero Trust frameworks and urgently protecting against ransomware in the coming years.”
