Why Network Segmentation Projects Fail

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 9 Apr 2026] Why Network Segmentation Projects Fail Rohit Dube Network segmentation is a foundational enterprise security control. Despite its recognized benefits, segmentation initiatives frequently fail in practice, and the field lacks a systematic empirical explanation for why these projects do not achieve their intended outcomes. This paper presents an empirical study of failed segmentation projects based on a survey of 400 U.S.-based\ network security practitioners. The survey was grounded in a two-part failure framework that separately measures general IT project failure factors and segmentation-specific technical and operational barriers. Clustering analysis of the responses reveals four distinct failure archetypes. Surprisingly, practitioners across all four archetypes propose general IT project management fixes over segmentation-specific fixes in the same ratio. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Applications (stat.AP) Cite as: arXiv:2604.08632 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.08632v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.08632 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Rohit Dube [view email] [v1] Thu, 9 Apr 2026 17:00:23 UTC (563 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.NI stat stat.AP References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)