Modern Cybersecurity Challenges
Organizations’ security teams are facing an array of cybersecurity challenges that impact their ability to protect the enterprise, and two of the biggest challenges are the security implications of increased telework and the cybersecurity skills shortage. Both of these make monitoring and securing the endpoint more complex, driving the need for increased endpoint security.
The Rise of Remote Work
Employees working from home introduce new cybersecurity risks than ones working in the office. Some examples of differences between securing employees working in the office and remotely include:
- Use of Personal Devices: Many organizations were not prepared to support a mostly or wholly remote workforce. As a result, many employees are working from personal devices that lack corporate cybersecurity solutions and are likely non-compliant with corporate security policies.
- Imperfectly Placed Security: Traditional approaches to security place cybersecurity solutions at the perimeter of the on-premises network and route all traffic through these defenses. With a remote workforce that often connects to cloud-based security solutions, perimeter-focused security either sacrifices network usability (due to inefficient routing) or security (if employees connect directly to the public Internet.
- Remote Incident Response: Traditionally, incident response teams have had the ability to respond in-person to security incidents if needed. With a remote workforce, these incident responders may need to rely upon untrained employees for critical response operations, potentially slowing or compromising the effectiveness of incident response.
As a result of these and other factors, securing a remote workforce is more difficult than a traditional, on-premises one. Now, the endpoint is a critical component of an organization’s cybersecurity, but it is frequently overlooked or undervalued in corporate cybersecurity strategies.
The Cybersecurity Skills Shortage
The cybersecurity industry is experiencing a significant skills shortage. While the demand for cybersecurity talent is growing, the supply is not keeping up. This is true both in terms of the overall number of cybersecurity personnel available (resulting in unfilled positions) and the lack of access to certain specialties.
As a result, organizations’ security teams are consistently understaffed and underskilled, making it difficult to effectively monitor and protect the corporate IT infrastructure against cyber threats. The fact that many organizations are relying on an array of disconnected and standalone security solutions only serves to exacerbate this problem. As a result, analysts receive more alerts than they can handle and cannot always effectively weed out the false positives from the true threats.
The Guiding Principles of EDR
EDR is designed to provide comprehensive endpoint protection against cyber threats. To do so effectively, an EDR solution must be designed based upon these principles:
- A Prevention-First Approach: Preventing an attack is always less expensive and damaging than attempting to remediate it after the fact. An EDR solution should attempt to identify and block potential threats before they reach or achieve execution on the target system.
- AI-Driven Multi-Layered Security: Cyberattacks are growing more complex and sophisticated. The use of AI and multi-layered inspection is essential to identifying and protecting against the latest fast-moving threats.
- Post-Infection Remediation and Recovery: Not all attacks can be prevented, and a rapid and correct response is vital to minimizing the impact and cost of the incident. Integrated remediation and recovery capabilities in an EDR solution are essential to achieving this.
- Consolidated Security and Threat Intelligence Architecture: Managing multiple solutions from multiple vendors is complex and degrades the effectiveness of the enterprise security team. A single, consolidated security platform is vital to maximizing security effectiveness.
- Unified and Cloud-Based Management: Configuration and management of security solutions takes away resources from protecting against real-world threats. A unified and cloud-based management program simplifies operations and scales with the organization.
What Effective EDR Can Provide
Effective endpoint security is a core component of the modern enterprise’s cybersecurity program. This solution should offer:
- Anti-Phishing Protection
- Anti-Ransomware Protection
- Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR)
- Anti-Bot Capabilities
- Post-Breach Detection, Remediation, and Response
An EDR solution that does not have all of these capabilities lacks the ability to protect the organization against modern security threats and hampers a security team’s effectiveness.
Harmony Endpoint provides enterprise security teams with the tools that they require to protect against modern cyber threats and meet today’s cybersecurity challenges. To discover more about Harmony Endpoint, check out the Harmony Endpoint solution brief. Furthermore, don’t hesitate to schedule a demonstration to see the capabilities of Harmony Endpoint for yourself and sign up for a free trial to try it out in your own network.
Feedback