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12/07/2026 12:15 pm
TL;DR: Pharmaceutical and biotech organisations are being pushed toward Zero Trust because flat IT/OT networks, legacy lab equipment, and high-value research systems create a large blast radius for ransomware and lateral movement, according to Elisity. The practical issue is not whether Zero Trust matters, but how to assess maturity and deploy microsegmentation without disrupting validated operations.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Elisity: Zero Trust Assessment for Pharmaceutical and BioTech Companies: A Practical Implementation Guide
By the numbers:
- 86.5% of organizations have started implementing at least one Zero Trust pillar, reflecting the shift from concept to operational necessity.
- The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report found that 35.6% of organisations cite managing consistent access across hybrid and multi-cloud environments as their top NHI security challenge.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when microsegmentation is missing in industrial environments?
A: Without microsegmentation, a single compromised host or account can move across too much of the environment, including build systems, update services, and operational assets.
Q: Why do converged industrial environments complicate Zero Trust Architecture?
A: Zero Trust assumes every access path can be continuously verified and constrained, but industrial environments often depend on legacy protocols, vendor maintenance paths, and devices that cannot support uniform controls.
Q: How do security teams know if segmentation is actually reducing risk?
A: They should look for shrinking reachable paths between critical systems, fewer allowed communications over time, and clear ownership for exceptions.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory critical communication paths Map the exact application, device, and workload flows that support manufacturing, lab operations, and clinical systems before defining segmentation policy.
- Tie policy to identity, not subnet Use identity-aware controls so segmentation decisions follow systems and users as environments change.
- Start with high-value containment zones Prioritise the systems whose compromise would halt production or expose drug development data, then create narrow, testable communication rules around those zones.
What's in the full article
Elisity's full guide covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Assessment questions and scoring criteria for each Zero Trust pillar in pharmaceutical environments
- Implementation considerations for microsegmentation across validated, legacy, and OT-heavy systems
- Business-driver mapping for research collaboration, intellectual property protection, and manufacturing continuity
- Examples of how organisations progressed from initial planning to enforced segmentation policies
👉 Read Elisity's practical guide to Zero Trust assessment for pharmaceutical and biotech companies →
Microsegmentation for pharmaceutical zero trust: where do teams start?
Explore further
12/07/2026 12:29 pm
Microsegmentation is now a governance control, not just a network design choice. In regulated manufacturing environments, the question is no longer whether segmentation exists, but whether it is identity-aware enough to constrain trust between systems that must stay operational. Pharma teams that treat segmentation as an IT topology project will miss the real risk, which is uncontrolled blast radius across validated and business-critical assets. Practitioners should manage it as an access governance problem.
A question worth separating out:
A: IAM should own the access policy and lifecycle rules, while networking and cloud teams provide the enforcement points and telemetry. The accountability line matters because Zero Trust fails when no single team owns the end-to-end access decision.
👉 Read our full editorial: Zero Trust assessment in pharma depends on microsegmentation
