Topic starter
10/07/2026 9:21 pm
TL;DR: Only 2% of organisations have fully achieved Zero Trust maturity across all pillars, while 88% of CISOs report major implementation challenges and nearly 70% of leaders still consider microsegmentation essential, according to Zero Networks. Continuous east-west visibility becomes the practical constraint on enforcement, not the policy concept itself.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Zero Networks: “How Real-Time Network Visibility Enables Automated Zero Trust Enforcement”.
By the numbers:
- Only 2% of organisations have fully achieved maturity across all Zero Trust pillars.
- Just 5% are microsegmenting their networks today.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when microsegmentation is built on stale traffic visibility?
A: Stale traffic visibility causes teams to segment around outdated assumptions, which either leaves hidden pathways open or blocks legitimate dependencies by mistake.
Q: Why does east-west visibility matter so much for Zero Trust enforcement?
A: Because Zero Trust is only as strong as the control that decides which internal flows are allowed.
Q: How can security teams tell whether segmentation policy is already drifting?
A: Look for growing exception lists, repeated rule edits, and mismatches between approved policy and current application behaviour.
Practitioner guidance
- Implement live east-west telemetry for segmentation Capture current communication flows across on-premises, cloud, IoT, OT, and Kubernetes environments before writing segmentation rules.
- Simulate rules before enforcement Test proposed microsegmentation policies against real traffic so teams can see which legitimate connections would be blocked before rollout.
- Classify assets by behaviour and function Use observed communication patterns to group assets by application, criticality, and required peers rather than by static inventory labels alone.
Bottom line: Microsegmentation only delivers Zero Trust value when policy is grounded in live east-west behaviour rather than a static network snapshot.
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10/07/2026 9:43 pm
Real-time visibility is now a governance dependency, not an observability bonus. Segmentation policy cannot be treated as a static design artifact when the environment changes continuously. The practical control question is whether policy generation is based on live communication truth or on stale network assumptions. Practitioners should treat live east-west data as a control prerequisite, not an operational nice-to-have.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should teams govern microsegmentation across human and machine identities?
A: Treat service accounts and workload identities as part of the segmentation design, not just the IAM programme. If machine identities can still communicate broadly inside the network, human access reviews alone will miss the real lateral movement paths. Governance should align identity scope, communication scope, and enforcement scope.
👉 Read our full editorial: Real-time network visibility is the missing input for microsegmentation