The Power of Microsegmentation: Exploring ECI's Industry-Leading Partnership with Zero Networks

Microsegmentation is making waves across the cybersecurity industry, but what exactly is microsegmentation, and how does it help secure the enterprise? Microsegmentation offers a way to apply zero trust security across networks to stop unauthorized lateral movement and stop ransomware in its tracks. ECI‘s new partnership with microsegmentation leader, Zero Networks, tailors this innovative cybersecurity approach specifically for financial sector organizations to address their most urgent cybersecurity needs.

Financial Firms Need Stronger Protections

Today's modern organizational network is heavily fragmented across home devices, multiple on-prem data centers, complex hybrid cloud environments and a growing number of platforms for edge, AI and other advanced technologies. Inevitably, this has fragmented network security into multiple products and interfaces.

It’s a state of affairs that makes day-to-day control and management of modern networks highly complex, with constantly expanding attack surfaces and security gaps. The problem is even tougher for financial services and investment firms, many of which maintain robust connectivity both internally and across what may be multiple financial and IT networks globally.

Private equity companies, hedge funds and other alternative investment firms routinely share highly sensitive data and may manage a huge volume of transactions, often in real time – setting the stage for significant and irreversible damage if malicious actors exfiltrate data or steal financial assets. Some of the most damaging attacks on financial firms involve ransomware – a chief threat appearing on many industry lists of top cyberthreats, as well as in ECI’s own research on our clients’ most pressing cybersecurity challenges.

Ransomware thrives on lateral movement within systems, and that’s where microsegmentation comes in as a powerful technique in the cybersecurity toolkit. The technology is designed to isolate (segment) network components to keep malware and other threats from spreading laterally. Now, ECI has teamed with Zero Trust to help our clients make the most of this revolutionary approach to cybersecurity.

Leveraging the Power of Microsegmentation with an Industry-Leading Partnership

As one of today’s most effective network security techniques, microsegmentation empowers security architects to divide the IT estate into distinct security segments down to the individual workload level. This allows developers to write unique security rules for each segment to control lateral movement and kill ransomware. The caveat is that organizations need to embrace a modern, agentless approach to microsegmentation that goes beyond today’s status quo of using software agents and manual rule creation. Otherwise, the solution won’t scale and gives a false sense of security.

Enter ECI’s new partnership with Zero Networks to overcome this status quo and deliver leading-edge microsegementation capabilities specifically tailored to financial firms. It’s a unified security suite that combines microsegmentation with Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). ECI clients can now leverage Zero Networks' unique, automated and agentless approach to microsegmentation that is easily scalable and highly customized for financial sector operations.  

The solution serves as a one-stop shop for client segmentation, server segmentation and the segmentation of communications from clients to servers. Most importantly, the solution eliminates the need for manual rule creation. The end result is a scalable implementation where only approved devices that pass a valid MFA process can traverse a connectivity port – ensuring security while maintaining, and even enhancing, performance and user experience.

Throughout, access rules and governance across the microsegmentation platform are informed by ECI’s domain-specific expertise in financial IT, security and compliance. We’re proud of this new ECI/Zero Networks partnership as the latest way ECI is delivering on our promise to ensure our clients can accelerate their business in a safe, secure environment.

Read the press release on the new ECI/Zero Networks partnership for more information about our microsegmentation services.