IMPLEMENTATION OF MICRO-SEGMENTATION OF A COMPUTER NETWORK TO IMPROVE NETWORK SECURITY

Abstract

The rise of hybrid-cloud data centers, as well as Virtualization has created an IT environment that is time-consuming and difficult to manage due to its ever changing state meaning breaches are more likely to occur and mitigating their impact is crucial. To address these shortcomings, this project discusses how Micro-segmentation based on the Zero Trust Model works by segmenting a network and identifying its components in order to protect it from attacks. Micro-segmentation functions by securing environments, inter and intra application traffic within a data center to greatly protect it while preventing network intrusion and isolating threats if they should occur. The implementation was done using VMware HOL Labs to simulate the micro-segmentation process. The study results in determining how to migrate and protect network resources using hypervisors with each of its virtual machines and individual components by involving the use of stateful firewalls while making analysis of traffic that moves in the cloud environment. Then coming to a conclusion that using hypervisors is a great option at micro-segmentation which supports containerization and mobile workloads.