Today the podcast is joined by Steve Winterfeld. He is the advisory CISO at Akamai Technologies, a cloud computing company. Steve helps Akamai CISO’s solve their most pressing issues and provide insights on security capability roadmaps. In addition to providing thought leadership as the cybersecurity industry transitions to DevOps and combats online attacks, Akamai produced a report The State of Segmentation 2023. Overcoming deployment obstacles proves to be transformational, and the white paper examines how different companies of varying sizes approach segmentation as part of their overall security strategy.
IMPROVING YOUR ORGANIZATION’S SECURITY STRATEGY
Segmentation is an architectural approach that divides a network into smaller segments for the purposes of enhancing performance and security. Akamai interviewed 1,200 IT and security decision-makers in 10 countries to measure the progress organizations have made in securing their environments, with a focus on the role of segmentation.
99% of respondents have deployed a Zero Trust Security framework – which requires all users, whether in or outside the organization’s network, to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated for security configuration and posture before being granted or keeping access to applications and data. And even the U.S. government and federal agencies are adopting this approach of authenticate, monitor, and validate user identities and trustworthiness, manage devices on a network, control access to data, secure applications and automate security monitoring.
But U.S. companies still face the greatest number of ransomware threats, reporting an average of 115 ransomware attacks over the past 12 months.
Benefits of Segmentation
Some of the benefits of segmentation are improve operational performance, reduce network congestion, limit cyberattack damage, protect vulnerable devices, and reduce the scope of compliance.
But overall, the benefit of segmentation is improving your cybersecurity by limiting how far an attack can spread.
Steve shares some of the big impacts in having a low ranking in deployment of segmentation in a multitude of industries. A large reason for slow timing of deployment of segmentation is talent. One of the big things we chat about at ClearanceJobs is the fact that not enough people have security clearances for the amount of job openings. Same in cyber: A lack of skills / expertise is the number one cause of delay in segmentation projects.
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