The Secret to Successful EDR For Your Business
What is the secret to successful EDR (endpoint detection and response) for your business? Moreover, why does successful EDR matter to your overall cybersecurity posture? Can it help you in this time of the coronavirus?
Many experts consider EDR an essential capability in modern endpoint security solutions; in fact, Gartner labels EDR essential for inclusion to its coveted Magic Quadrant report. However, EDR doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, it operates in the context of your entire organization’s cybersecurity strategy.
Therefore, you need to support your EDR to make it successful? How? Why? Here’s what you need to know.
The Secret to Successful EDR (For Businesses)
What Does EDR Do?
Before we can examine the making of successful EDR, we need to explore what EDR offers.
In many ways, EDR functions in a manner similar to SIEM, another major component of enterprise cybersecurity. EDR detects security events and incidents and facilitates response. Additionally, EDR reduces digital attack surfaces, limit attacks’ impacts, and provide threat intelligence.
Moreover, EDR can help with device discovery, bringing previously unseen endpoints into the cybersecurity fold. These can include Internet of Things (IoT) devices that notoriously disappear from normal security monitoring.
Through all of these capabilities, EDR helps to detect, identify, and respond to threats outside the scope of legacy antivirus. The most commonly opposed cyber threats include fileless malware, zero-day attacks, and advanced persistent threats.
To put EDR into a more modern context, EDR can help bring disparate endpoints into a centralized viewpoint; visibility matters when so many workers need to continue shelter in place to avoid coronavirus exposure.
With that established, let’s discuss the secret to successful EDR. Or should we say “secrets”?
Be Proactive in your Endpoint Security
To benefit from successful EDR, you need to take an active role in your endpoint security. Nothing in cybersecurity can be considered “set-it-and-forget-it.” You need to conduct regular cybersecurity monitoring. These include security audits and threat hunting; even the most sophisticated cybersecurity solutions cannot catch all threats. Even if it could, your IT security team would still need to follow up with EDR alerts to determine legitimate threats from false positives.
Additionally, your enterprise needs to stay up-to-date with the patches and updates to all of the endpoints connecting to the network. Every patch contains vital security information which can assist your cybersecurity tools. Neglecting them can seriously impact the effectiveness of your threat detection and response.
Finally, make sure to check on your configurations. Misconfigurations represent the most damning potential issue in cloud environments, and making sure unauthorized access isn’t possible facilitates you EDR.
Train Your Employees
Does your average employee know how to recognize a phishing attack? Or a spear-phishing attack? Do they know what kinds of Internet-based behaviors put sensitive data at risk?
If you feel unsure of the answers to these questions, it’s time to emphasize cybersecurity training for your employees. Even in a time of mass work-from-home, this can take the form of short videos or resources which help outline what employees need to know. In fact, after work-from-home ends for employees, this style of short and regular training proves more effective than longer lectures.
Speed Your Incident Response
You can measure successful EDR by the time it takes to detect a threat and remediate it. Therefore, your IT security team and user base as a whole need to prepare to face any eventual threat.
So a strong incident response plan is vital, obviously. However, it doesn’t end there. An incident response plan is only as strong as your ability to execute it effectively. Your entire employee-base needs to have practiced your incident response and understand the points of contact during a security incident.
How to Learn More
For more on successful EDR, check out our Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide.