Using Microsegmentation to Ease the Weight of Compliance

It may seem ironic, but government agencies at all levels wrestle with the difficulty of compliance with regulatory requirements even as they issue regulations for others (sometimes including themselves) to meet.

For example, just as the healthcare industry follows HIPAA, so too do Veterans Administration hospitals – along with all federal, state, local, tribal and territorial health organizations. Then there are government-only policies, such as the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) and Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), with their own reporting requirements for agencies.

In many of these cases, utilizing a network microsegmentation approach can lighten the load of compliance reporting. Microsegmentation can streamline compliance work and speed up audit processes. The approach helps reduce the scope of compliance environments by segmenting compliance-related data from other IT assets, minimizing the scope of compliance efforts, thus reducing cost and complexity.

Learning Objectives:

• Review the role of network visibility through microsegmentation in identifying compliance-related data and workloads
• Outline ways to incorporate compliance into criteria for microsegmenting networks
• Identify metrics that can be used to track the time and cost savings in generating compliance reports