According to the study, 89% of public sector organizations — including Federal Civil, Federal DoD, and SLED — faced ransomware attacks in the past two years, which is the highest exposure rate of any industry surveyed.
Key takeaways:
Ransomware represents a fundamental threat to public trust and national security. When attacks compromise essential services, they erode citizen confidence. Adopting standardized segmentation frameworks ensures that government agencies can protect sensitive data and maintain operational continuity.
Traditional containment strategies are too slow to stop modern lateral movement. Manual intervention allows breaches to spread across agency networks.Transitioning to microsegmentation enables security teams to isolate infected systems rapidly and prevent large-scale service disruptions.
Evolving regulatory mandates and insurance requirements are reshaping security architectures. Navigating the complexities of compliance and cyber insurance is increasingly difficult. Integrating segmentation into the core strategy satisfies strict audits while improving the defensibility of insurance claims.
- Technical complexity often acts as a barrier to achieving a true Zero Trust posture. High costs and organizational resistance can stall vital security modernization. Leveraging external expertise helps public sector organizations overcome these implementation hurdles to deploy effective microsegmentation at scale.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Public sector organizations report that microsegmentation allows them to contain ransomware 46% faster than they could without it.
The top three protected assets are business-critical applications (91%), followed by servers (82%) and endpoints (82%).
No, segmentation is not replacing existing security; instead, it is being integrated into broader strategies that already include network firewalls, remote access/VPN, and cloud security.
Most organizations deploy it to isolate high-risk assets (74%), contain ransomware (66%), and ensure regulatory compliance (62%).
While not always a strict requirement for compliance, 78% of public sector organizations believe that having segmentation in place improves the likelihood of their insurance claims being approved.
The most notable obstacles reported are the cost and complexity of the implementation, though resistance within the organization can also slow down the adoption process.
The outlook is positive, with nearly half of organizations planning to implement microsegmentation in the next two years and 80% of current users intending to increase their budgets for it.