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How to Improve Your Endpoint Security Visibility

Why Visibility Is the Most Important Endpoint Security Capability

How to Improve Your Endpoint Security Visibility

How can your enterprise improve its endpoint security visibility? What capabilities or tools can make detecting and removing threats easier over time? 

Surprisingly, while malware might pose a serious threat to your business, the more serious cybersecurity issue often lingers unnoticed: lack of visibility. Hackers love limited network visibility—it enables them to penetrate the perimeter undetected and plant dwelling threats with ease. Further, not having endpoint security visibility often leads to threats dwelling for months at a time, if not years. 

Download Link to Endpoint Security Buyer's Guide

Also, never forget that each endpoint represents a potential gateway into your network at large. If an endpoint becomes compromised without visibility, you may have laid out the welcome mat for a data breach.

Obviously, you need to improve your endpoint security visibility to prevent this. The question becomes how your enterprise can do this effectively. 

Here are some ways to improve endpoint security visibility in your enterprise!

How to Improve Your Endpoint Security Visibility

Ditch Your Legacy Antivirus

No one can overstate the dangers your enterprise welcomes into your business processes by sticking with a legacy antivirus solution. Often, enterprises just become so used to their legacy solution it feels comfortable to stay the course. 

Do not stay the course.

Not only does legacy antivirus not improve your endpoint security visibility, but it may also actually detract from it; most of those early solutions don’t have the capacity to monitor the current average number of endpoints in an enterprise network. Thus many endpoints may connect undetected, the absolute worst-case scenario for your cybersecurity. 

That doesn’t begin to go into detail its other failings, such as its lack of capabilities suited to modern threats. In summary, get rid of your legacy antivirus and find a next-generation endpoint security solution instead.

However, please do not take this message as a suggestion to rush out and choose a solution at random. Picking the wrong kind of endpoint security solution can end up just as damaging as sticking with legacy antivirus. Instead, carefully consider your needs and your enterprise use case. 

This can include your industry and size, but it also includes your specific endpoints and infrastructure. Do you have a large remote workforce? A BYOD policy? How many endpoints on average connect to your network every day? 

Obviously, the answers should determine how you should approach your endpoint security visibility. 

Deploy EDR

Granted, if you find a suitable next-generation endpoint security solution, you should also receive endpoint detection and response (EDR). However, you may not, and it proves worth considering as a critical capability if you don’t have it.

For those familiar with cybersecurity EDR operates similarly to SIEM (another cybersecurity essential). The capability monitors your endpoints for security events and sends alerts of possible incidents to your IT security team. Additionally, it can also assist with the containment and remediation.  

While this may appear simple on the surface, no one can overstate the importance of EDR in ensuring your endpoint security visibility. Even Gartner acknowledges it as a critical capability in its reports on endpoint protection platforms. 

Unfortunately, the digital perimeter cannot deflect all threats 100% of the time. Eventually, something will break through the walls. Thankfully, EDR can monitor every endpoint on your network and ensure threats don’t install themselves on endpoints without evaluation. 

Deploy Data Loss Prevention 

Endpoint security doesn’t just enforce your enterprises’ digital perimeter. In fact, it also monitors the traffic going to and from your endpoints and makes sure that traffic remains safe. 

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) watches your email traffic and application movements to ensure sensitive data remains on the proper endpoints and servers. In fact, it can help your enterprise classify your data and makes sure employees can’t transfer or share data outside their positions. 

This matters to your endpoint security visibility because each endpoint engages in extensive traffic every day. Without proper visibility, you won’t know what information enters and leaves your enterprise every day. Sensitive data could end up in the wrong hands at any time. 

Additionally, you should also monitor traffic entering your endpoints for any sort of malicious inbound attacks.      

Get Your Employees Involved in Endpoint Security Visibility

Here’s the dirty secret of cybersecurity: your users’ behaviors often determine the success or failure of your solutions. If they buy in and participate with your cybersecurity, your enterprise should see a marked improvement in your overall digital safety. On the other hand, if they fail to follow best practices, your endpoint security solution shall face more problems in the long term. 

So you should involve your employees in your endpoint security visibility. To do this, you need to incorporate them in your incident response plans. After all, they interact with the endpoints on a regular basis—they should (theoretically) notice potential issues first. 

An incident response plan helps your employees know who to contact about a potential security incident, how to contact them, and how to document the problem for immediate investigation.

Don’t just rely on your endpoint protection platform to monitor your endpoints. Your enterprise should call upon all of the eyes and minds working with your endpoints every day.  

Use Endpoint Monitoring 

Monitoring your users’ behaviors only represents half the equation. Each endpoint has its own behaviors, which could become exploited by hackers either directly or remotely. Therefore, you need to establish baseline behaviors for the endpoints themselves.

Endpoint monitoring establishes this kind of visibility. Endpoint monitoring allows your security team to monitor, collect, and analyze your endpoint behaviors. It establishes baselines behaviors to evaluate whether it ever acts abnormally and can alert your security team promptly to investigate. 

Also, your IT team should insist on every endpoint connecting to your network registering before receiving access. This should prevent rogue devices from gaining access to your databases. 

Endpoint security visibility needs to look at the endpoint inside and out. Never forget that. 

How to Get Started

If you want to learn more about endpoint security visibility, you should check out our 2019 Buyer’s Guide. We cover the top solution providers in the market and their key capabilities. We even provide a Bottom Line for each.   

Download Link to Endpoint Security Buyer's Guide

  

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