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ECI’s collaboration with Zero Networks to offer clients an advanced microsegmentation platform is one of our most popular industry partnerships… and for good reason. Our automated, scalable approach to dividing, or segmenting, IT assets into protected regions is particularly effective against ransomware and other attacks that exploit lateral movement within systems. Armed with the ECI/Zero Networks platform for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), firms can achieve stronger operational resilience in the face of an attack.
Not All Microsegmentation is Created Equal
Microsegementation is an increasingly popular network security technique for security architects to divide the IT estate into distinct security segments, even down to the individual workload level. This helps stop ransomware and other malicious exploits in their tracks and can position organizations to be more resilient in the face of attack. The timing couldn’t be better, given how Europe’s new Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) places strong regulatory emphasis on ensuring resilience.
A typical alternative investment firm must maintain large-scale IT systems that require robust connectivity both internally and across what may be multiple financial and IT networks. These systems are filled with huge volumes of highly sensitive information that may be shared widely to support global transactions. The real-time nature of these transactions and other business processes means that damage is often irreversible if malicious actors tap into such systems to exfiltrate data or steal financial assets.
Against this backdrop, IT leaders looking to the marketplace for ZTNA solutions that combat such attacks must realize that not all microsegementation solutions are the same. Firms must embrace a modern, automated approach that goes beyond today’s status quo of excessively manual processes for rules creation. Without automation, teams quickly get bogged down with the human toil of configuring software and writing rules.
The irony is that this manual burden grows in direct proportion to the number of segments created – so a more well-designed microsegmentation schema becomes even more dependent on automation to deploy properly. This is why automation is essential for resilience amid the real-world conditions that most firms contend with today. Without it, resilience is difficult to maintain in the face of lateral attacks that ricochet across your organization’s IT applications and infrastructure with ruthless efficiency and speed.
The Right Approach to Microsegmentation Can Dramatically Improve Resilience
The more IT leaders understand about the ECI/Zero Networks approach, the more they see how it fuels operational resilience. For instance, our approach can easily be configured for continuity of operations even for remote workers collaborating on a crowded ecosystem of countless apps running on prem, in the cloud and across multiple devices and third-party networks.
The ECI/Zero Networks platform is fully automated, and it’s agentless so there’s no need to get bogged down with endpoint protection software. The platform’s access design is such that all privileged ports are closed by default unless briefly opened after successful MFA. Furthermore, the platform can easily integrate with current IT infrastructure. That’s because it’s designed to run on top of existing systems – so firms don’t need to pursue a wholesale modernization effort of all their IT infrastructure and networks before they can achieve more ZTNA-enabled resilience.
In a similar sense, no firewall rulesets need to change. Instead, our microsegmentation platform takes control of an existing firewall – coordinating its role within the larger microsegmentation schema for the enterprise. These are just a few examples of how resilience is enhanced when organizations infuse the right zero trust protocols and solutions across their IT networks. The ECI/Zero Networks partnership brings a new level of security and worry-free business acceleration by protecting against cyberattacks and ensuring rapid resilience in the face of any attack.
Learn more about the ECI/Zero Networks Microsegmentation services here.
