Most microsegmentation tasks fail earlier than they even get off the bottom—too complicated, too sluggish, too disruptive. However Andelyn Biosciences proved it would not need to be that approach.
Microsegmentation: The Lacking Piece in Zero Belief Safety
Safety groups right now are below fixed strain to defend in opposition to more and more subtle cyber threats. Perimeter-based defenses alone can not present ample safety as attackers shift their focus to lateral motion inside enterprise networks. With over 70% of profitable breaches involving attackers shifting laterally, organizations are rethinking how they safe inner site visitors.
Microsegmentation has emerged as a key technique in reaching Zero Belief safety by proscribing entry to crucial belongings primarily based on id moderately than community location. Nevertheless, conventional microsegmentation approaches—typically involving VLAN reconfigurations, agent deployments, or complicated firewall guidelines—are usually sluggish, operationally disruptive, and troublesome to scale.
For Andelyn Biosciences, a contract growth and manufacturing group (CDMO) specializing in gene therapies, securing its pharmaceutical analysis and manufacturing environments was a high precedence. However with hundreds of IT, IoT, and OT gadgets working throughout interconnected networks, a traditional segmentation method would have launched unacceptable complexity and downtime.
Initially, Andelyn chosen a community entry management (NAC) resolution to deal with these challenges. Nevertheless, after nearly two years into an implementation with excessive operational overhead and an lack of ability to successfully scale segmentation, the safety crew grew to become annoyed with the dearth of progress. The complexity of agent-based enforcement and handbook coverage administration made it troublesome to adapt the answer to Andelyn’s quickly evolving setting.
Finally, they determined to pivot to Elisity’s identity-based microsegmentation resolution, enabling them to quickly implement least-privilege entry insurance policies with out requiring {hardware} adjustments or community redesign.
Watch the Digital Case Research Replay
Hear from Bryan Holmes, VP of Info Expertise at Andelyn Biosciences, and Pete Doolittle, Chief Buyer Officer, Elisity to find how a contemporary method to microsegmentation accelerates Zero Belief adoption from years to weeks.
Bryan shares their journey from preliminary deployment to managing 2,700 energetic safety insurance policies—all with out disrupting operations or requiring new {hardware} or community configurations.
Watch Now to Study:
- Sensible methods for implementing microsegmentation throughout IT and OT environments with out disrupting crucial pharmaceutical manufacturing and analysis operations.
- speed up Zero Belief initiatives by leveraging identity-based safety insurance policies that shield mental property, guarantee regulatory compliance, and safe scientific trial information.
- get real-world insights on scaling from preliminary proof-of-concept to enterprise-wide deployment utilizing automated discovery, the Elisity IdentityGraph™, and dynamic coverage enforcement.
Watch the Full Case Research Right here
The Problem: Securing a Advanced, Excessive-Stakes Setting
The pharmaceutical business faces distinctive safety challenges. Analysis and manufacturing services home crucial mental property and should adjust to strict regulatory necessities, together with NIST 800-207 and IEC 62443. At Andelyn, safety leaders have been more and more involved concerning the dangers posed by a flat community structure, the place customers, gadgets, and workloads shared the identical infrastructure.
Regardless of conventional perimeter defenses, this construction left Andelyn susceptible to unauthorized entry and lateral motion. The safety crew confronted a number of key challenges:
- Lack of full visibility into all linked gadgets, together with unmanaged IoT and OT belongings.
- The necessity for segmentation with out disrupting operations in extremely delicate analysis environments.
- Compliance pressures requiring fine-grained entry controls with out rising administrative overhead.
Bryan Holmes, VP of IT at Andelyn Biosciences, knew that conventional segmentation fashions would not work. Deploying community entry management (NAC) options or rearchitecting VLANs would have required important downtime, impacting crucial analysis and manufacturing timelines.
“We wanted a microsegmentation resolution that would present quick visibility, implement granular safety insurance policies, and accomplish that with out requiring a large community overhaul,” Holmes defined.
The Elisity Strategy: Identification-Based mostly Segmentation With out Complexity
Not like legacy segmentation options, Elisity’s method doesn’t depend on VLANs, firewall guidelines, or agent-based enforcement. As an alternative, it applies identity-based safety insurance policies dynamically, utilizing the prevailing community switching infrastructure to implement least-privilege entry.
On the core of Elisity’s platform is the Elisity IdentityGraph™, which correlates metadata from Energetic Listing, endpoint detection and response (EDR) options like CrowdStrike, and CMDB techniques to create a real-time map of customers, workloads, and gadgets. This visibility permits organizations to implement insurance policies primarily based on id, conduct, and danger—moderately than static community constructs.
For Andelyn, this meant they might obtain full community visibility and implement segmentation in weeks moderately than months or years, with out operational disruption.
Deployment: From Visibility to Coverage Enforcement in Weeks
Andelyn’s segmentation journey started with complete community discovery. Elisity’s platform passively recognized all customers, workloads, and gadgets throughout IT and OT environments, together with beforehand unmanaged belongings. Inside days, safety groups had a whole stock, enriched with metadata to find out which belongings have been trusted, unknown, or probably rogue.
Subsequent, Andelyn moved to coverage modeling and simulation, utilizing Elisity’s “no-fear” dynamic coverage creation engine. As an alternative of implementing insurance policies instantly, safety groups simulated segmentation guidelines to make sure they’d not disrupt crucial workflows.
As soon as validated, insurance policies have been regularly activated—first in lower-risk environments and later throughout manufacturing techniques. As a result of Elisity’s platform doesn’t require reconfiguring community infrastructure, enforcement was seamless.
“We have been in a position to transfer from monitoring mode to full coverage activation in a fraction of the time we anticipated,” Holmes famous. “And we did it with out disrupting analysis or manufacturing operations.”
The Outcomes: Stronger Safety With out Added Complexity
With 2,700 energetic safety insurance policies now in place, Andelyn has considerably improved its Zero Belief maturity whereas guaranteeing compliance with business rules.
By making use of identity-based microsegmentation, the corporate has:
- Prevented unauthorized lateral motion, lowering the potential blast radius of a breach.
- Protected pharmaceutical analysis information and mental property from insider threats and exterior assaults.
- Diminished operational overhead, as segmentation insurance policies are dynamically enforced with out the necessity for fixed handbook updates.
- Streamlined compliance reporting, aligning with NIST 800-207 and IEC 62443.
Not like conventional approaches that depend on static entry lists or require devoted segmentation {hardware}, Elisity’s platform constantly adapts as customers, workloads, and gadgets transfer throughout the community. Insurance policies are cloud-managed and dynamically up to date primarily based on real-time insights from the Elisity IdentityGraph™, guaranteeing safety stays efficient whilst threats evolve.
The Future: Scaling Microsegmentation Throughout the Enterprise
Following the success of its preliminary deployment, Andelyn is now increasing microsegmentation insurance policies to extra websites and use instances. The flexibility to implement least-privilege entry dynamically, with out requiring main community adjustments, has made Elisity a necessary a part of the corporate’s safety technique.
For different organizations dealing with related challenges, Holmes gives a transparent suggestion:
“Begin with visibility. You’ll be able to’t shield what you do not see. From there, deal with modeling insurance policies earlier than enforcement. The flexibility to simulate insurance policies first was a game-changer for us.”
Microsegmentation is commonly seen as a fancy, multi-year initiative that requires important funding and operational disruption. Andelyn Biosciences’ case proves in any other case—with the suitable method, organizations can obtain Zero Belief segmentation in weeks, not years.
In case your segmentation undertaking has stalled—or worse, by no means actually began—there’s a greater approach. See how identity-based microsegmentation can speed up Zero Belief in your group. [Request a Demo Here]