#microsegmentation

Application programming interfaces have been successful because they define the limits of permissible exchange, including who may take what action, when, and under what circumstances. Those limitations create a framework for understanding the behavior of distributed systems. And they make it possible to enforce policy at the boundary between interacting systems. What constrains distributed systems isn’t access, but execution. With autonomous data movement and action occurring at machine speeds, where processes unfold sequentially over time rather than as a singular event, APIs no longer provide a sufficient means of enforcing boundaries. The problem is no longer whether a request is valid. It is whether a sequence of actions remains safe. For agentic systems, there needs to be runtime guardrails around what they can read, write, and execute. Microsegmentation, enforced through network and kernel-level policies, defines those guardrails. APIs made systems predictable APIs were successfu