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Critical Steps to Achieving Comprehensive Endpoint Security in 2020

Problems Solved with Endpoint Security Solutions

Critical Steps to Achieving Comprehensive Endpoint Security in 2020

Your enterprise needs comprehensive endpoint security in 2020 to survive. While that may seem like the typical doom and gloom talk associated with cybersecurity, a data breach can absolutely destroy your business. Statistics indicate that 60 percent of small businesses close in the aftermath of a data breach. 

Moreover, the average data breach costs close to $4 million, including fines and legal fees. However, that doesn’t take into account the long term reputational damage a data breach can inflict.

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Overwhelmingly, customers reject brands and businesses that suffer from data breaches; they feel that they can’t trust their personal information to these companies. With the new year approaching, hackers remain poised to strike at any moment. 

This naturally brings us back to comprehensive endpoint security in 2020; specifically, how your business can achieve the same. 70 percent of all breaches still originate at the endpoint according to IDC. So here are some critical steps to keep them secure going into the new decade! 

Critical Steps to Achieving Comprehensive Endpoint Security in 2020

Step 1. Get Monitoring

How can you protect what you can’t see? The answer is you can’t. Therefore, you need endpoint monitoring to ensure your endpoints remain secure in a number of different ways: 

  • Through application control, you must maintain awareness of all the applications operating on your corporate or connected endpoints. Your IT security should have visibility over their movements and data access and have the ability to restrict permissions as needed. Additionally, application control can prevent users from downloading applications without permission. 
  • Endpoint monitoring enables your team to ensure all connected endpoints possess all of their updates and upgrades. These updates typically come with essential threat intelligence, and their absence can leave each device vulnerable.  
  • Also, your team needs the power to “brick” endpoints as necessary if they end up in malicious hands. Thus you can wipe sensitive data on lost or stolen endpoints or prevent the device from working. 

Remember, each endpoint device forms a part of your network web. Thus, each endpoint could serve as a stepping stone into your network. Keep a close eye. 

Step 2. Work Discovering All Endpoint Security Gaps

For achieving comprehensive endpoint security in 2020, you need to find the vulnerabilities lurking in your endpoint-composed digital perimeter. Granted, the endpoint digital perimeter doesn’t exist as it once did, but it can still provide a penetration route for hackers. 

Thankfully, your endpoint security can close vulnerabilities by discovering them through endpoint monitoring, as explored above. However, it extends further than that. In fact, you can close vulnerability gaps simply by having a next-generation solution that fits your individual use case. 

Legacy endpoint security can’t accommodate remote workforces, bring-you-own-devices (BYOD) culture, or the Internet of Things. Of course, each of these could represent a vulnerability in its own right. Yet your enterprise use case could involve any and all of these network components. By selecting an endpoint solution that can secure these disparate endpoints, your enterprise can close vulnerability gaps before they welcome in attackers. 

Step 3. Use Machine Learning

What does your comprehensive endpoint security in 2020 need to defend against? Malware of all species and kinds. These include phishing, spyware, ransomware, cryptocurrency mining malware, fileless malware, and evasion tools, among others. 

Obviously, these aren’t static threats. Hackers constantly evolve and refine their threats to try to bypass endpoint security. Persistent and accurate threat intelligence can help, but your IT security would still need to apply it. 

Additionally, your IT security team needs to analyze alerts generated by endpoint security solutions and conduct threat investigation. This represents a huge drain on time and resources. Moreover, it can cause burnout. 

Thankfully, machine learning in endpoint security can help execute exploit prevention, ransomware protection, and behavior monitoring; all of these helps utilize threat intelligence automatically and reduce threat hunting efforts. Also, it can perform an initial alert analysis. 

Step 4. Deploy EDR

For comprehensive endpoint security in 2020, you need EDR (endpoint detection and response) capabilities. In fact, Gartner even outright states it is a critical capability for enterprise endpoint protection platforms. 

This functions in many ways like SIEM; EDR monitors the network for threats that had penetrated your connected endpoints. If it detects suspicious programs or behaviors, it generates an alert for investigation. These can facilitate threat hunting and can freeze malicious programs from running at all.  

EDR collects and correlates security events from multiple sources including firewalls, endpoints, and servers, drawing on information to find hidden security threats. EDR provides necessary visibility into the actions of your corporate endpoints. Now’s the time to embrace it. 

Other Steps for Comprehensive Endpoint Security in 2020

You can check out our Solutions Review Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide for more on the top vendors and their key capabilities! It can help you determine your use-case and a solution that fits your enterprise.

Download Link to Endpoint Security Buyer's Guide

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