The Future of Microsegmentation Cyber Defense What Is OT Breach-Ready Cyber Defense?

Microsegmentation Is Strategic Defense Against Intrusion Damage

- By Agnidipta Sarkar, Chief Evangelist, ColorTokens

FIGURE 1 In a traditional network, breaking through the perimeter into the network core allows access to almost every node on the network without additional security checks. (Image by jeferrb from Pixabay)

Breaches happen. When microsegmentation is implemented properly, it's a strategy that can limit the damage a breach can do, keeping an intruder limited to a small part of an OT or IoT network. Understanding microsegmentation is now an important part of an embedded systems education for engineers and developers.

Breach-ready cyber defense is a proactive and resilient approach designed to ensure that operational technology (OT) environments such as manufacturing lines, refineries, pipelines, rail control systems, or telecom switching networks-can continue operating even if a cyber breach occurs. This approach goes beyond preventive cybersecurity controls and best practices that focus on making it difficult for attackers to gain access, prioritizing active containment upon early detection to prevent attacks from expanding beyond the initial point of entry.

Unlike traditional perimeter-focused security, such as that shown in Figure 1, which assumes you can keep attackers out, breach-ready cyber defense assumes compromise is inevitable and focuses its activities on:

• Prevention: Anticipating attacks through attack path mapping, surface reduction, interception modeling, and lateral movement control

• Response: Containing attacks mid-stream by quarantining zones, isolating unaffected systems, and disrupting breaches

• Resilience: Evolving organizational endurance through effective containment, recovery, and failover capabilities