Smarter Segmentation, Stronger Security: Targeting the Real Risks

In today’s competitive market, traditional practices don’t make the cut; on the contrary, organizations are making use of AI-powered insights to stay ahead on consumer behavior and tailoring their campaigns according to them. As a service provider, you need to capitalize on redefining your ad strategy according to the data-driven targeting. 

The best way for safeguarding your organization is to utilize the concept of smart segmentation. It enables adaptive and risk-based defenses that respond to real time behavior of your consumer. 

Intrigue to learn more about this planned technique? Keep reading to find all about it!

Why Traditional Segmentation Falls Short?

For years, security has relied on the static segmentation model for targeting “the right people.” It basically boils down to dividing a network into zones based on geography, departments, or trust.

However, with the advancement in technology, like hybrid infrastructures and SaaS platforms, the static segmentation doesn’t assist in finding the right audience. To be exact, the traditional segmentation practices often result in little segmentation, leaving a wide area exposed, which further slows down several business operations.

Moreover, it presents the highest level of risk as it lacks the ability to contextual awareness for identifying assets, users, and activities. 

Understanding Real Risks in the Modern Enterprise

Another big challenge in cybersecurity lies in the inability of organizations to prioritize tasks. Most organizations focus dedicatedly on headlines and checklists instead of understanding and identifying the actual reason behind certain behavior. 

To put it into context, here is a list of factors that every business should make use of for smart segmentation. 

• Importance of certain assets. 
• Exposure of the asset
• Sensitivity of the data it processes. 
• Users behavior and usage.
• Noted vulnerabilities.
• Patch status of the issue.

Without understanding and highlighting these layers, all these segmentation efforts become guesswork. 

What is Smarter Segmentation?

We told you to make use of smarter segmentation for precise purchase-based targeting; however, what is this more effective filtering process? To put it in perspective, smarter segmentation is a risk-informed technique that allows dividing and controlling access within the network.

Here is a list of characteristics of smarter segmentation:

• Microsegmentation: Breaking down of networks into granular zones down to the workload or application level.
• Policy Automation: Making use of software-defined policies for enforcing rules based on identity, device health, location, and behavior.
• Visibility and Context: Continuous monitoring of traffic flows, user behavior and asset relationships.
• Risk Prioritization: Apply stronger restrictions where there is a higher risk than deploying resources broadly across the entire board. 

It makes use of things like real-time data, threat intelligence, and buyer behavior analytics to make predictive decisions related to how users and systems interact with one another. Unlike the contemporary models, this smarter segmentation builds walls for guiding traffic and limits lateral movement while responding to shifting conditions. 

Benefits of Smarter Segmentation

Still not convinced to adopt the concept of smarter segmentation? In this section, we have mentioned various advantages posed by smarter segmentation. 

• Reduction in the number of pathways that can be exploited by the consumer.
• Ensure there is a faster incident response team that can isolate affected segments. 
• Granular access control helps meet compliance framework handling sensitive data.
• Allows traffic insights, which further helps teams to detect abnormal patterns.
• Can be efficiently integrated with cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.

These were all benefits offered by making use of a smart way of segmentation.

Building a Smarter Segmentation Strategy

To implement the practice of smarter segmentation, you will need to prepare a custom audience platform that has a continuous process and can adapt as per your needs and requirements.

Mentioned underneath is a roadmap to get started with a smarter segmentation model.

1. Set out your assets, data flows, user roles, and application dependencies. This way, you will be able to segment the areas of most impact.
2. Give priority to the things that require protection based on the risk. You can do this by identifying critical assets and risky areas of concern.
3. Consider solutions like software-defined networking, zero trust network access, or cloud-native security that support and identify behavior-based policies. 
4. Definitive access controls that are specific and manageable. You can start with a smaller group, learn from its deployment, and then explain gradually.
5. Continuously monitor and adapt reviews on how users and systems behave, and adjust to changes for segments based on the gathered data.

By following these steps in order, you will be able to build a strategic segmentation. 

Wrapping Up

With smarter segmentations, you can focus on real-time consumer behavior and context rather than focusing on traditional methods or guesswork. This further allows your businesses to build security protocols and strategies that are aligned with the right operational needs.

Gaurav Rathore