Zero Trust Microsegmentation on AWS: Real TCO & Hidden Costs
Sick of watching your security project turn into a monthly ransom note? I ran 1–3 year TCO scenarios for Zero Trust microsegmentation on AWS, pitting agent vs agentless and pulling practical, no-BS tactics to cut those hidden bills.
Can a Zero Trust microsegmentation pilot add more than $1,000 per month in AWS charges? Many teams underestimate how enforcement and mirroring footprints scale with east‑west traffic, agent choices and VPC architecture. Procurement often sees the bill only after rollout.
Hidden Costs of Zero Trust Microsegmentation in AWS: Microsegmentation on AWS reduces blast radius but creates hidden bill items. These include NAT Gateway egress, VPC endpoints, ENIs, traffic mirroring, CloudWatch log ingest, and agent resource costs. The piece quantifies those drivers with 1–3 year TCO scenarios, agent versus agentless benchmarks, a cost estimator CSV, and concrete cost reduction tactics teams can apply to size pilots and justify spend.
Primary AWS bill drivers
The largest incremental AWS charges when adding Zero Trust microsegmentation come from a few price rows. These scale with traffic and the enforcement model. Plan for NAT Gateway data processing and hourly charges, cross-AZ data transfer, Traffic Mirroring bandwidth and ENIs, VPC endpoint data and requests, and CloudWatch Logs ingest and storage.
Map features to these invoice lines before approving procurement. Doing so avoids underestimating TCO by 40% to 70% in many rollouts.
Which AWS lines spike first
Stick around — the cheapest-looking option might be the costliest once the surprise invoices start rolling in...
Read the full analysis about zero trust microsegmentation on aws real in the original article.