What is Network Segmentation and Do You Need It?

Current projections from leading cybersecurity firms estimate 2023 has witnessed over 400 million data breaches as of May. On the other hand, 2022’s data breaches impacted a total of 442 million people across multiple industries. Today’s threat actors have devised numerous ways to leverage user ignorance or error to access sensitive data. Surveys conducted by IBM found that 95% of data breaches were associated with user error, contributing to ransomware attacks, shared passcodes, and missed security patches. While employee training is a great way to ensure security policies are kept, it is not enough to prevent errors.

As previously discussed, 5G networks have opened new doors for many workflows and tasks. Greater network capacity supports greater amounts of data, thus also enabling a potential security risk. To accommodate and protect increasing data volumes in today’s cybersecurity landscape, many supply chain players are adopting network segmentation to mask singular networks as a multi-channel system which hackers often avoid. Such an infrastructure is highly beneficial since it provides IT teams with:

1. Facilitated behavior tracking that helps detect oddities
2. Connection monitoring to pinpoint device usage
3. Tiered system access to prevent users from sharing unnecessary data
4. Seamless quarantine procedures for compromised records
5. Manageable data visibility for faster responses

Is Network Segmentation the Best Option for You?

As with many modernization systems, cybersecurity plans do not come in a one-size-fits-all format. Nevertheless, organizations cannot afford to go on without a solution in place. While network segmentation has a track record of threat prevention, it is most suitable for businesses seeking to:

• Manage larger influxes of data
• Expand personnel teams
• Deploy additional technologies with the network
• Improve communication with disparate IT teams
• Simplify yet protect data access for remote workers and field teams

Fortunately, you don’t have to calculate the need for network segmentation alone. Whether choosing to segment data or expanding current networks, it is recommended that you meet with a dependable connectivity team to assess your workloads and physical space before drawing a conclusion.

How A Connectivity Team Helps

Gathering both expertise and IT resources from leading OEMs, connectivity teams can support businesses during the optimization process with:

• Preliminary site surveys to locate workflow, recurrent bottlenecks, device usage, and employee confidence in terms of network usage.
• Custom network engineering to implement current technologies along with new systems.
• Real-time network monitoring to target solution performance within different challenging situations. This allows your team to optimize and restructure systems before they enable a breach.
• Post-installation validation to ensure your network was optimized according to preset plans.

Once equipped with a systematic network optimization plan, businesses can follow a scalable process to protect data while welcoming ongoing growth. For more information about network segmenting and other connectivity trends, contact our AlwaysConnected team.