As you can imagine, concerns about AI-driven threats have come up often in our recent discussions with our clients here at ColorTokens. And for good reason. AI has revolutionized the threat landscape. It can quickly reverse-engineer services, processes, and applications, discover multiple vulnerabilities faster than human attackers ever could, and use automation to chain 30, 40, or more vulnerabilities together at machine speed. The breadth and speed of these AI-driven attacks mean that a breach is virtually assured.
After gaining an initial foothold, agentic attacks conduct reconnaissance and move laterally across workloads, assets, and environments within seconds. Then they disrupt operations, steal sensitive data, or encrypt critical systems for ransom. This has resulted in organizations suffering significant damage to business operations, reputation, customer trust, and revenue.
As a result, rigorous controls to ensure business resiliency in the face of an attack have become even more essential in this new world of autonomous, AI-based attacks. Resilience, not just prevention, must become a focus for security leaders today.
Microsegmentation is a foundational capability for building cyber resilience. It enables an enterprise architecture that is postured in advance to contain attacks—human or agentic—before they breach the network perimeter.
Leading industry analysts confirm this. Forrester’s James Plouffe has written, “As resilience becomes more of a strategic focal point for security and risk pros, microsegmentation can and should play a larger role in organizations’ broader security initiatives…”
The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026 was published recently. It evaluates the top solutions available in the microsegmentation sector. You can access it without charge here: Forrester Wave™ Microsegmentation 2026: ColorTokens Leader
Of the 22 solutions cited by Forrester in the initial Microsegmentation Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026, and the 10 down-selected for evaluation in the newly published Wave report, ColorTokens was selected as one of only four leaders.
The evaluation assessed vendors against defined criteria, including flow discovery, visualization, policy administration, host-based enforcement, administrative experience, vision, and partner ecosystem. I’m happy to report that ColorTokens received the highest possible scores across these criteria. Among the four Leaders, it was the only vendor to receive a 5/5 score, which Forrester defines as Superior, in the reporting and diagnostics, OT, IoT, and healthcare criteria.
We view this recognition as a reflection of our focus on helping clients become breach ready and cyber-resilient amid an accelerated threat environment.
Highlights of Forrester’s Take on ColorTokens’ Solution
ColorTokens’ vendor profile in the report says, “Its recent focus is on improving key workflows with AI.” ColorTokens provides two classes of AI automation. First, our Xshield AI enables plain-English querying of the enterprise environment, with up-to-date situational awareness of emerging MITRE ATT&CK Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) and CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs). Then, it automatically generates strong microsegmentation policies to prevent reconnaissance, lateral movement, and vulnerability exploitation.
This solves a pressing problem: because AI-driven vulnerability discovery is so fast, patching every exposed asset in a large enterprise environment in time to stop a new exploit has become virtually impossible. The recent CISA Binding Operational Directive 26-04, issued on June 10, requires patching within three days of discovering a critical vulnerability, but this is often an unachievable goal in large-scale enterprises, and even if achieved, it would not stop AI-accelerated attacks in time. ColorTokens’ solution lets security teams immediately isolate vulnerable assets with controls tuned to the TTPs and KEVs, buying them time to implement patches.
The report goes on to cite ColorTokens “…strengthening its identity-based segmentation capabilities by integrating acquisitions.” Non-human identity is crucial for controlling network traffic to prevent agentic attacks or rogue AI agents. As organizations adopt agentic workflows to boost productivity, internal AI agents can become insider threats, often accessing resources beyond those of human users. This risk exposes enterprises to data breaches and facilitates reconnaissance and lateral attacks. The ColorTokens solution provides guardrails that enforce least-privilege access for AI agents to perform valid business processes, while blocking unauthorized access and agentic attacks. The company has built expertise in this area organically and through its 2024 acquisition of PureID.
Read more: Enable AI Without Expanding the Blast Radius
ColorTokens offers zero trust policy enforcement across an unparalleled number of enforcement methods, agent-based, agentless, and native controls. The report says that ColorTokens “…offers some of the most flexible deployment options of any vendor…In addition to its own Xshield agent, ColorTokens can be deployed via existing endpoint detection and response (EDR) agents or in multiple agentless modes.” The solution features unified visualization and policy management across diverse enterprise environments, including IT, IoT, containers, and multi-cloud infrastructures.
To do this, ColorTokens offers
- Agent-based endpoint enforcement that configures host-based firewall rules in Windows, Linux, and Mac, or it integrates with EDR systems such as CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and MDE to provide asset and traffic visibility using their existing sensors, eliminating the need to install and maintain additional endpoint software and accelerating microsegmentation deployment.
- Agentless enforcement for IoT, OT, and legacy devices through its Gatekeeper appliance, or by generating rules for leading switches and hardware firewalls.
- Service mesh integration to enforce traffic policy for Kubernetes containerized applications at the API level.
- Native controls for cloud environments for both server-based and serverless compute functions.
This pervasive approach to microsegmentation enforcement offers two key benefits: it aligns with clients’ existing network infrastructure without costly modifications, and it enhances the value of their current cybersecurity investments, ensuring comprehensive microsegmentation coverage without gaps or policy inconsistencies. We believe this is why Forrester’s take is “ColorTokens is a strong choice for organizations seeking deployment flexibility or the ability to leverage existing technology investments as a launchpad for their microsegmentation initiative.”
To schedule a discussion with our solution experts on how we can help your organization gain business resilience in this new age of AI-accelerated threats, reach out to us.
