Devices often act as a gateway for threats not only through businesses-abled devices but even through the personal devices connected to the enterprise network. For businesses, managing endpoint devices has been a major challenge. Mobility, which is being proliferated by the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), is arousing the need for device management solutions. Organizations need to define what type of devices they would be handling when it comes to their infrastructure, mobile devices, laptops; and desktops PCs are the most common kind and many of them consider servers in a data center as an endpoint. 

The definition of endpoints varies majorly among the leaders, but most of them agree with the definition concerning the security, endpoint security addresses the risks presented by devices connecting to the enterprise network. 

Why do we need endpoint security?

According to an endpoint security solution provider Bitdefender, about 57% of the enterprises experienced a breach in the past 3 years. Even after the massive rise in investments in device security, 24% of the organizations still suffered a breach in the first 6 months of 2019. Trojans, ransomware, and phishing are the most concerning threats haunting most of the businesses.

Here are some of the reports when it comes to endpoint security that will tell you about how important it is for businesses,  

1. According to Absolute, 70% of breaches are still originating directly at the endpoint, and over 42% of the endpoints experience encryption failure. Every month 19% of the endpoint devices, on average, need at least 1 client or patch management.

2. Vailmail found that an enterprise receives 3.4 billion fake emails every day, and currently, 90% of the MNCs are vulnerable to email spoofing.

3. AttackIQ surveyed and found that only 41% of the enterprises feel that their IT security team can effectively determine the gaps in their security infrastructure. While 75% of the businesses say that their teams can’t respond to security incidents within 1 day.

Initially, when endpoint security became imperative for businesses, there was an influx of antivirus protection solutions, wherein each device had a different security solution for problems. During those days, the enterprise only had to be worried about the cybersecurity against malware, and most of them were of the similar types exploiting similar loopholes in the system. 

Over the years, the threat landscape has evolved, and in fact, evolved too fast for the antivirus solutions to actually deal with them. Antivirus solutions individually fail to deal with the evolving nature of threats, while hackers might still be using the traditional malware attacks but they are increasingly using their own tactics to penetrate the network.  For example, an employee of a business might be unaware that there is a malware in his USB drive, and as soon it’s connected to the business network, it will be activated. 

Fileless malware attack software is on the rise and is quietly being used to infiltrate the business network and exploit the native processes for the business. The number of potential attacks coming from the emails has been one of the biggest threats, and antivirus protection around the world has failed to act on them. Antivirus solutions struggle with data traffic and monitoring various components of IT infrastructure, such as applications and ports.

How are enterprises reacting to the demand for endpoint security?

1. CIOs and CISOs have prioritized endpoint security looking to provide greater resilience against threats going into 2020, and as cloud services have become one of the major endpoint solutions, cloud-based Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) are on the rise.

2. Gartner predicts that global information security and risk management end-user spending is all set to grow at a CAGR of 9.2% for the 5-year period from 2017 to 2022 and is expected to reach $174.5 billion in 2022, which makes the spending on endpoint security reach close to $50 billion.

3. According to the Morgan Stanley Research Group, endpoint security tools are 24% of the IT security spending, and by 2020, it is all set to reach $128 billion.

4. According to IDC, 70% of the breaches originate from the endpoints despite all the security spending.

Currently, there is a colossal surge happening as the businesses are rapidly shifting the device usage, prioritizing resilience in their endpoint security strategy, as they move into 2020. Businesses leaders are looking for a combination of solutions with not only improved asset management based on real-time data but even a designed-in regenerative software solution at the BIOS level of every device. The challenge for businesses is to find solutions that provide complete security, asset management, and real-time monitoring for all the endpoint devices.  

Sean Maxwell, Chief Commercial Officer at Absolute, a provider of endpoint security solution, said in a statement that Trust is at the center of every endpoint discussion wherein the CIOs and CISOs want to know will our solution be able to cope with different threats, self-heal in case of threat, and even keep functioning after the threat has passed. Real-time data from the devices will provide actionable insights to the IT teams managing the security but solutions need to be resilient and self-heal for all the assets. The devices should be able to reinforce security controls, as taking the actions against threats, reliance against varied kinds of threats is what makes the endpoint security solution complete.

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is one of the types of solution that organizations can pursue, as it provides visibility in real-time, detection of threats, and resilience against them. What makes EDR more effective than other security solutions is that it can monitor endpoints and databases for malicious activities internally, and it even seeks out threats that might have penetrated your enterprise network internally. 

Wrap-up

Endpoint security for businesses is a major challenge because each device offers different capabilities on connectivity and resilience in terms of threat detection. The demand for flexibility and push toward a reduction in cost is driving businesses toward cloud, making the data and business network prone to threats. Endpoint security solutions need to be dynamic enough to deal with several of the threats everyday that might emerge from third party applications and ports. To know more about endpoint security, download our latest whitepapers on Security