Contain the blast radius
Deny east-west by default and allow only the flows you approved. The intrusion is contained to where it landed instead of becoming a fleet-wide incident.
Enforce
The fear with segmentation is locking yourself — or an application — out of a box you can't reach. Every part of the rollout is built so you can't.
The order matters
A host that walls off its own control channel is a host you drive to. Rules are applied in an order that makes that impossible, and the agent and the server agree by hash on exactly what landed.
01
Watch what the policy would do, with zero impact, for as long as you want. Nothing is blocked.
02
Read the list of every flow that would stop if you enforced everywhere today. Clear it, or accept it deliberately.
03
Management paths go on first, then the allows you approved, then block-all. The order is not configurable, on purpose.
04
The agent reports what it applied and the server checks the hash. A mismatch is drift, and drift is visible.
When you need it to stop now
Quarantine hands a host an empty ruleset. Its default action is block, and the agent injects its own control-plane allow — so the host keeps its Segmenta connection and nothing else. You get containment and you keep the ability to release it.
Select the hosts and quarantine them together. It takes effect as fast as the agents can apply it.
Releasing a host restores exactly the mode it was in beforehand — you are not left reconstructing its policy by hand.
Ports published from containers on a quarantined host are contained too, rather than quietly surviving as a bypass.
Cloud-managed hosts are refused rather than shown a green chip: an empty rule set on a cloud security group is the permissive state, not containment.
What teams use it for
Least-privilege segmentation means a compromised box can't pivot to the domain controller, the database, or the backups.
Contain the blast radius
Deny east-west by default and allow only the flows you approved. The intrusion is contained to where it landed instead of becoming a fleet-wide incident.
Answer the insurance question
"Is your internal network segmented?" stops being a conversation about intentions and becomes a screen you can show someone.
Questions
The things worth knowing before you protect the first host.
The host keeps enforcing the last policy it was given. Losing the control plane does not open the firewall, and it does not close it further either.
Yes, and that is the recommended way. Protection is set per host, so you can start with something forgiving and work up to the domain controllers.
Every change is recorded and attributable, and a scope can be rolled back as cleanly as it was rolled out. A host can also be returned to Learning, which stops enforcement without discarding the policy.
Yes, with just-in-time access. It opens one administrative port on one host to one stated address, for minutes rather than days, and asks for your second factor at the moment you ask. It's an ordinary rule, published and withdrawn through the same path as every other, so the history shows who opened what, and it closes on its own.
On Linux, enforcement is applied as a delta against the existing ruleset rather than a wholesale rewrite. On Windows, protecting a host backs up its own rules and enforces default-deny, so a Group Policy allow can't hold a door open; returning it to Learning restores them.
Under enforcement it is denied, which is the point — but the enforcement preview exists so you meet that traffic before it is denied rather than afterwards.
The trial includes enforcement. Turn protection on when the preview is clean, one host at a time.