It was only last month that ECI announced our new partnership with Zero Networks to bring advanced microsegmentation capabilities to financial sector clients, but the zero trust security platform is already becoming one of our most talked about services. The interest is such that ECI CTO Steve Schoener and Zero Networks Vice President for Customers Nicholas DiCola hosted a webinar to help answer the flood of questions we’ve been getting about this exciting new offering.
Let’s recap the key points and main takeaways from the webinar, including highlights from a lively Q&A session that showed how the new ECI/Zero Networks platform is providing the right answers to some of the most nagging zero trust pain points on the minds of financial sector IT teams.
Optimizing Microsegmentation for Zero Trust at Scale
The webinar was a great opportunity to learn about both the concept of microsegmentation generally, as well as the specific approach Zero Networks takes in delivering microsementation to clients that sets them apart from competitors. The simple definition of microsegmentation is the practice of dividing a network into very small regions, called microsegments. If one computer occupies its own segment and is breached, the attacker is blocked and cannot move laterally. Not surprisingly, microsegmentation is particularly sought after to guard against ransomware, which thrives on lateral movement.
But not all microsegmentation solutions are the same. Many approaches rely on software agents and manual rule creation, leading to bottlenecks in performance and scalability. The panelists explained how, without automation, the human toil of configuring software and writing rules grows in direct proportion to the number of segments created. The results in a conundrum: the more elegant and detailed your microsegmentation design, the more impossible it is to implement and scale manually.
By contrast, the panelists explained how the Zero Networks platform is fully automated, meaning that no humans are required to manually configure firewall rules. And it’s agentless, meaning that nothing needs to be installed on the endpoints. What’s more, the platform’s segment permissions are MFA-enabled – meaning that all privileged ports are closed by default, and open briefly only after successful MFA. All these attributes make it easy for organizations to quickly and securely scale zero trust protection in the enterprise.
Customizing the Benefits to Financial Sector Firms
The webinar also gave participants a chance to ask questions, including one from a viewer about whether microsegmentation is needed if everyone in a company works remotely. The answer from the panelists was an emphatic ‘YES!’. The reason is that microsegments can delineate even the most fragmented network ecosystems. And if anything, the added devices and connectivity that go with remote work has further fragmented an already crowded ecosystem of countless apps running on complex ecosystems of on prem, cloud and third party networks.
Another webinar viewer asked whether there was any need to upgrade or replace existing equipment to make room for the ECI/Zero Networks microsegmentation platform. The good news is that the platform is designed to run on top of existing systems – so that means little to no new additional technology investment is needed to partner with ECI in delivering Zero Networks protections as a service.
Another viewer was encouraged by the answer to his question about whether existing firewalls would get in the way of the ECI/Zero Networks microsegmentation solution. The panelists explained to the viewer that some firewall rulesets do need to change – but these are fairly simple configuration tasks that put the ECI/Zero Networks platform in control of the existing firewall, coordinating its role within the larger microsegmentation schema for the enterprise.
Ultimately, the webinar audience came away with a new level of understanding of how microsegmentation is in a class of its own as a way to infuse zero trust throughout IT networks. They further learned how Zero Networks is at the leading edge within the microsegmentation space, and how ECI is now bringing these benefits directly to our clients for fast, worry-free business acceleration.
Learn more about the ECI/Zero Networks Microsegmentation services here.
