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How to Make Your Endpoint Protection Comprehensive

IDC Survey Finds Over a Third of Businesses Hit by Ransomware

How to Make Your Endpoint Protection Comprehensive

How can you make your endpoint protection comprehensive? How can you ensure you have an endpoint security solution which fits your enterprise use-case? 

We do not ask these questions idly. Ensuring endpoint security comprehensiveness can make the difference between a secure digital perimeter and multiple security gaps. Indeed, the cyber threat landscape only continues to grow and evolve. 

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Moreover, the average enterprise network scales at previously unheard-of rates with cloud adoption. Where once singular endpoints connected to a single infrastructure, now enterprises must contend with multiple endpoints and multiple networks. 

In other words, to make your endpoint protection comprehensive, you need to evolve past your legacy antivirus solution. 

How can your enterprise do this? Here are some of our suggestions. 

How to Make Your Endpoint Protection Comprehensive    

Get Rid of Legacy Antivirus

If we had a nickel for every time we tell enterprises to get rid of their legacy antivirus, we could type it out on a gold keyboard. Many enterprises continue to express reluctance to replace their outdated cybersecurity solution. 

Often, they feel constrained by the prospect of ripping and replacing—the expenses and the scale of the task. Other times, the businesses just feel more comfortable with the legacy interface.

In either case, these enterprises put themselves and their users at extreme risk. Legacy antivirus just can’t match the capabilities or threat intelligence of next-generation endpoint security. Most antivirus solutions optimally defend a few centralized endpoints, not the increasingly disparate endpoints of modern networks. 

In other words, legacy antivirus can’t keep up with the hackers. 

To make your endpoint protection comprehensive, you need to take the time to properly evaluate your current digital perimeter. Speak with your IT security team and determine whether your cybersecurity actually meets your needs. If it doesn’t, make the effort to replace your legacy solution with a strong endpoint security solution.

Never Neglect EDR

No one can stress the importance of EDR in modern endpoint security; in particular, technology research giant Gartner emphasized the importance of EDR in all of their recent reports on EPPs. 

EDR helps your enterprise detect threats which penetrated your digital perimeter. While your digital perimeter can deflect or deter most threats, eventually something can and will break through. Therefore, your cybersecurity needs to shift focus from prevention to detection via EDR. 

In short, EDR monitors endpoints for threat behaviors or security events and then alert your IT security team. Additionally, it can also provide a storyboarding feature to help your team discover the attack steps. This is a critical capability for remediation as it helps your team trace the threat and close potential security holes. 

Real-Time Response and Cloud Security Are Musts

Consider your network as it exists now. Imagine now the worst occurs—you suffered a data breach or dwelling threat. Now think about what trying to remediate this crisis. Trying to manually sanitize all of the infected files proved challenging even on on-premises networks. In this era of cloud adoption, it becomes downright impossible. 

That doesn’t even begin to explore the issues that come with trying to isolate infected network areas. Fortunately, taking the time to make your endpoint protection comprehensive can add real-time response to their arsenal. This enables your enterprise’s IT security team to easily connect with their command-line interface, which in turn allows them to kill illicit processes and remove files automatically. 

Additionally, you can call upon your endpoint security to enforce a perimeter on your cloud assets. Endpoint security for the cloud allows you to share information on all of your end-users via interconnected dashboards. It can provide you with full-fledged threat-intelligence and contextual pictures of attacks.  

Endpoint Protection Comprehensive and Training

Cybersecurity does not operate in a vacuum. Instead, it becomes a part of your overall cybersecurity posture. This involves your everyday business process and your employees. Indeed, your employees constitute either your biggest strength or your biggest weakness concerning endpoint security. 

Your employees need to buy-in to your cybersecurity for it to perform optimally. If they don’t, they could accidentally subvert your digital perimeter and let hackers in. Therefore, you need to invest in consistent and endpoint security training for all of your enterprise employees.

First, this suggestion absolutely includes your remote employees as well—in fact, it applies to any user employed by your enterprise with a connecting endpoint. Every connecting endpoint represents a potential gateway into your network 

Second, you need to make this training engaging. A yearly three-hour lecture only results in boredom, not in best practices. Instead, you should invest in monthly (or even bi-weekly) training sessions which only take up a half-hour. These quicker sessions actually improve retention and fit far more easily into busy schedules. 

Finally, these sessions must be engaging to employees of all tech levels. Hands-on training or team exercises can help employees recognize threats far more than any Powerpoint presentation. Above all, remember that if you make it tedious, employees won’t treat it with the gravity it deserves. 

As a footnote, your enterprise also needs to consider how to train employees in an incident response plan. Actually, your enterprise should run regular practices of your incident response plan. This helps ensure your employees know who to contact and how to contact them in the event of a security incident; also, you can use the practices to evaluate any potential pitfalls in your plan. 

Create IoT and BYOD Security Plans

Your enterprise’s infrastructure doesn’t just consist of laptops and desktops. It also consists of the mobile devices connecting to your network and any IoT devices. The latter especially can create serious security threats to your enterprise; they usually don’t have any protections on their firmware and can prove difficult to upgrade or monitor. 

Meanwhile, mobile devices can simply overwhelm your IT security team through sheet numbers. In either case, to make your endpoint protection comprehensive, you need to have plans to increase your visibility. A next-generation solution can offer your enterprise increased visibility and the ability to set policies for multiple devices in disparate places. 

Moreover, your IT security team can use your solution to make every device register before gaining access. This prevents any device from covertly connecting and thus creating dark spaces in your network. 

How to Get Started

If you want to learn more, be sure to check out our Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide! We cover the top vendors in the market and their key capabilities. 

Download Link to Endpoint Security Buyer's Guide

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