Segmentation Readiness: Perspectives from a Product Manager
As a Senior Product Manager here at vArmour, I’ve had the opportunity to dive deep into many of our customers’ experiences and challenges.
One recurring theme I’ve encountered in conversations with IT security teams is the growing complexity of their environments and the increasing difficulty of keeping them secure. Today, it’s not enough to simply prevent breaches—organizations also need to focus on minimizing the damage when breaches occur.
And many are relying on segmentation to help make this happen.
The drivers behind customer segmentation initiatives are varied. Some have mergers and acquisitions that require integrating disparate systems, and others are addressing new regulatory compliance requirements related to resilience. Yet, they all face a common challenge—while they want to isolate critical assets and functions, they often struggle to get a clear understanding of their environment to know where to start. This lack of visibility into their networks makes it difficult to pinpoint and prioritize the assets that need to be segmented.
Additionally, most security teams I’ve spoken with have concerns about the potential unintended consequences of deploying segmentation policies and the ongoing challenge of keeping them updated as their environments change. This uncertainty has been a significant barrier to effective implementation. Understanding the intricate relationships, dependencies, and criticality of different workloads is essential for making segmentation work.
To navigate these challenges, organizations need to focus on several key areas:
- Lack of Visibility: Organizations often lack a complete understanding of their environments and the associated metadata for context, which is critical for effective segmentation.
- Phased Approach: Successful implementation requires a phased approach, starting with an accurate understanding of the assets and dependencies before prioritizing, planning, and tuning deployment.
- Policy Management: Sustainable and automated long-term policy management is essential to maintain effective segmentation.
At the vArmour Product Team, we’re addressing these challenges head-on with our SaaS-based Relationship Cloud. We’re providing these customers with continuous, real-time visibility across all of their assets and dependencies and turning native telemetry into a ground truth map of their environment. This map provides detailed insights and context that are critical for streamlining segmentation initiatives, including:
- All workloads and endpoints
- Relationships and dependencies between all workloads
- Traffic patterns between workloads
- Contextual data such as environment, criticality, application function, application name, and region
With this comprehensive view, our customers are able to effectively implement segmentation. Whether they need to prevent communication between development and production environments, segment PCI environments to limit the scope of audits, or enforce secure paths to critical data, our Relationship Cloud is making these segmentation objectives possible.
The journey to segmentation readiness can be complex, but with the right visibility and insights, we can overcome the most challenging aspects of successful deployment. At vArmour, we’re dedicated to helping our customers bridge visibility gaps and enhance operational resilience, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see our product enable them to achieve these goals.
About Neha Kumari:
Neha is a seasoned product manager with a track record of driving positive business impact through technology products. With an extensive background in enterprise technology — both as a hands-on developer and as a product manager, she has built scalable and efficient solutions for complex technical challenges in industries like retail, payments, insurance, etc. She finds inspiration in music, nature and exploring new culinary experiences.
