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14/07/2026 4:22 pm
TL;DR: Financial services firms are using automated, identity-driven microsegmentation to close legacy network gaps, contain lateral movement, and preserve critical operations, according to Zero Networks customer examples. The real lesson is that resilience now depends on structurally limiting access paths, not relying on faster patching or manual rule management.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zero Networks: Building Cyber Resilience in Financial Services: 6 Real-World Success Stories
By the numbers:
- Baron Funds reached full segmentation in 30 days with zero disruptions to network traffic
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce lateral movement risk in enterprise networks?
A: Start by reducing the number of internal trust paths an identity can cross.
Q: Why do legacy systems make microsegmentation harder to deploy?
A: Legacy systems often depend on undocumented protocols, shared services, and exceptions built up over years of mergers and patchwork operations.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about audit-driven segmentation projects?
A: They often treat segmentation as a one-time remediation exercise instead of a control that must keep matching production behaviour.
Practitioner guidance
- Map east-west dependencies before writing segmentation policy Inventory which applications, services, and admin protocols actually communicate in production, then remove any communication path that is not required for business operation.
- Separate privileged protocol controls from standard access controls Treat RDP, SSH, and similar admin channels as distinct high-risk pathways and require stronger verification than ordinary user traffic.
- Validate containment with failed-path testing Test whether an internal foothold can still reach crown-jewel systems after policy enforcement, then repeat the test after any major environment change.
What's in the full article
Zero Networks' full post covers the operational detail this analysis intentionally leaves for the source:
- Customer-by-customer deployment context across private credit, investment banking, and wealth management environments.
- Observed examples of how deterministic automation was used to build policies from real traffic instead of manual rule sets.
- Specific results such as segmentation timelines, audit outcomes, and protocol-level controls used to avoid outages.
- Implementation detail on how the agentless approach fit legacy infrastructure without introducing new endpoints.
👉 Read Zero Networks' analysis of microsegmentation for financial services resilience →
Microsegmentation in financial services: what teams should change now?
Explore further
14/07/2026 4:30 pm
Microsegmentation is becoming an access governance problem, not just a network design choice. Once identity-driven controls decide which assets may communicate, the boundary between network policy and access policy narrows sharply. That makes the discipline relevant to IAM and PAM teams, because east-west trust is effectively an entitlement problem. Practitioners should treat segmentation as a governance layer that limits where identities can operate.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable for controlling privileged protocol exposure?
A: Accountability should sit with the teams that own identity governance, network segmentation, and privileged access design, not with detection alone. Zero trust, PAM, and network policy all intersect here, so ownership needs to be explicit. If privileged protocol exposure is still broad, the governance model has not assigned clear control responsibility.
👉 Read our full editorial: Microsegmentation as cyber resilience for financial services networks
