Forrester just published the second edition of The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions. Just over two years separates this research from the previous report, and the technological advances over that short time are stunning.

The previous evaluation, The Forrester New Wave™: Microsegmentation, Q1 2022, was all about layer 3 microsegmentation in a data center (or private cloud) environment. Back then, you only had two approaches to choose from:

1. Software (agents).
2. Infrastructure (switches and hypervisors).

Microsegment Everything, Everywhere, By Network, Workload, And Identity

But today, enterprises are microsegmenting these different environments in a much more sophisticated fashion:

• Public cloud workloads (in four or more hyperscalers)
• Microservices, in both public cloud and on-premises
• Operational technology (OT) and IoT
• Healthcare
• Data center/private cloud (still primary use cases)

Instead of just static, layer 3 network rules, vendors have added all ports and protocols (layer 4), user and machine identities (layer 7), process-level metadata, and even endpoint detection and response (EDR) risk scores to microsegmentation policy.

These new, responsive, and dynamic security policies support bangin’ features like auto-quarantine, emergency button (mass quarantine), and live recovery during an active ransomware attack. None of that was possible two years ago, but now these features are found across multiple vendor solutions.

We’re At The Dawn Of The Golden Age Of Microsegmentation

What a time to be alive! The goodness doesn’t stop there. This Wave evaluation included four vendors that weren’t in the last evaluation that each bring a fresh approach and, we think, will quickly challenge the market leaders.

Two of these vendors, Ordr and Elisity, work to succeed in microsegmentation at the network switch, where previous networking solutions faltered. Their approach is well suited to device-heavy environments like OT and healthcare.

TrueFort integrates with existing EDR agents for telemetry gathering and policy enforcement.

Zero Networks comes at the space with an entirely new approach built on remotely programming host firewalls and letting the explicit policy grow organically through multifactor authentication approvals. Zero Networks even has policies specific to domain controllers.

Microsegmentation Leaders Are Still Leading

The vendors from the previous Wave haven’t been standing still. Illumio and Akamai Guardicore have been busy, the former adding layer 7 support and tons of features around incident response and the latter integrating Zero Trust network access with microsegmentation. ColorTokens is focused on making its customers “breach-ready.”

Meanwhile, teams at Cisco are attempting to leapfrog the whole industry with bleeding-edge technology like eBPF and data processing unit support to realize the vision that it calls Hypershield.

Other Vendors Deliver Microsegmentation With Their Own Approaches

Broadcom delivers microsegmentation for virtualized environments based on its acquisition of VMware. Hewlett Packard Enterprise provides network-based microsegmentation based on its Aruba acquisition. Hillstone Networks has two microsegmentation product offerings, one for private-cloud virtual environments and another for container, bare-metal servers, and cloud hosts.

Read The Research; Microsegment The Things

Microsegmentation buyers have more choices than ever and can have some confidence that these once-failure-prone projects may actually work this time. That’s great news, because the demand for microsegmentation, a frequent inquiry topic for Forrester clients, has never been higher.

Forrester clients can read The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2024, to find the solution that works for their environment.

This blog was written by former Forrester Principal Analyst David Holmes.