IT leaders sometimes overlook one of the most vulnerable elements of the business network – endpoint devices. In the face of an uptick in data and security breaches, enterprises must focus on endpoint security for the extensive protection of their essential business assets.
Applications and end-user devices are now becoming a crucial security concern in any organization. Any device that has access to the corporate network resources is a potential target for the threat actors.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, IT security teams also have to deal with the new trends of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and remote work environments and a wide range of other networked devices.
External threats are an obvious concern, but insider threats are equally severe. Insider threats can come from employees who disable or manipulate critical applications that secure data and devices. This careless and malicious behavior can put the corporate network at risk.
According to a recent Juniper Research study, by 2023, around 33 billion records will be compromised by cyber criminals annually. This indicates that businesses of all sizes should pay closer attention to their cyber endpoint security structure.
Integrating Threat Intelligence Natively
Engaging global threat intelligence is crucial in today’s threat environment. When members of the community encounter new threats, that information is shared among all members. This will enable them to detect known threats and quickly identify the unknown threats automatically.
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Endpoint and network should participate in threat intelligence sharing and keep applying growing threat intelligence across the devices in their environments. There should be continuous exchange of intelligence so that vulnerabilities can be identified on the endpoint can also then be identified and prevented on the network.
Threat intelligence alone is not enough; many organizations that subscribe to intelligence feeds are drowning in data they are unable to translate into actionable intelligence. Organizations are simply buying more data in vain if they are unable to translate threat intelligence into new protections.
Protect Against Threats
The traditional security products are designed to detect known threats before they enter an organization. But, by the time an unknown threat is detected, critical assets have already been compromised, and detection is pointless.
Even though cyber criminals often reuse existing malware and exploit techniques, they sometimes modify existing attacks and create new ones to escape detection, leaving a whole range of threats undetectable by most endpoint security products.
Detection and remediation on the endpoint are inevitably people-intensive, time-consuming, and inefficient. It can be avoided if the endpoint can prevent known and unknown threats. Ideally, the prevention capabilities of the endpoint security solution should not depend on prior knowledge of an attack and should incorporate various analysis and prevention methods to maximize effectiveness.
The Need for Automation
Attackers have scalability, automation, and specialized tools at their disposal. To defend against these increasingly sophisticated attacks, organizations often employ point solutions that are people-intensive, complex, and insufficient.
To outsmart the attackers, an organization must make successful attacks more challenging and less profitable. And the efficient way to achieve this in a sustainable and scalable fashion is with automated prevention.
Full Visibility into Activity on the Cloud, Network, and Endpoint
To successfully prevent an attack, organizations need full visibility of all devices, users, and data across their cloud, network, and endpoint. This visibility is crucial to understand the context of an attack, enforce security policy, and correlate security events to improve the security posture.
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Merging natively integrated threat intelligence with the automated prevention of known and unknown threats, can dramatically improve an organization’s security posture. It will make the organization less appealing to opportunistic attackers and also minimize the likelihood of a successful targeted attack.
Today’s business environment is mobile, and resources have become the new perimeter. As companies expand and more employees work remotely, the number of vulnerable endpoints increases. Centralized solutions are no longer enough to protect networks. Organizations must embrace multi-layered endpoint security solutions or face a greater risk exposure to costly breaches.
