Protect your IT infrastructures with Endpoint Security Solutions

Businesses of all sizes are at risk from cyber criminals, organized cybercrime, and malicious or accidental threats. Endpoint security is at the front line of cyber security and represents one of the primary targets on which organizations seek to protect their business networks.

As the sophistication of threats grows steadily, so does the need for more advanced endpoint security solutions. Here’s what they are and how important they are to protecting your business.

What is Endpoint Security?

Endpoint security protects endpoints or entry points of end-user devices, such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, from exploitation by malicious actors. In short, these security systems protect endpoints, whether on a network or in the cloud, from cybersecurity threats.

Traditional endpoint security has evolved from the usual anti-virus to provide comprehensive protection against sophisticated malware and constantly evolving threats.

Endpoint protection systems are designed to rapidly detect, analyze, block rapidly, and contain ongoing attacks. To achieve this, they collaborate with other security technologies that provide visibility into advanced threats to accelerate detection and remediation response times.

Types of endpoint security

Some of the most important types of terminal security are:

• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): These solutions continuously monitor endpoint devices to detect and respond to cyber threats. They log all activities and events as well as workloads to provide end-to-end visibility, helping to detect incidents that would otherwise go undetected.
• Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP): provides a centralized set of tools to protect devices. Its main functions include antivirus protection, data encryption, and data loss prevention. Its centralized interface allows all functions to be monitored and controlled from one location.
• Extended Detection and Response (XDR): is a SaaS-based security tool that detects threats and responds to incidents. It natively integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations system that can unify all licensing components.
• Managed Detection and Response (MDR): is a service that remotely searches, monitors, and responds to threats using advanced technology and human expertise. It enables organizations to quickly identify and minimize the impact of threats without hiring additional staff.

What is the Difference Between Endpoint Security and an antivirus?

These two terms may lead one to think that they are the same, but some key aspects make them different:

• Anti-virus software is designed to protect a single endpoint. However, endpoint security software scans the enterprise network as a whole and can provide visibility of all connected endpoints from a single location.
• Anti-virus relies on the user manually updating databases or allowing updates at a specific time. In contrast, endpoint protection platforms offer interconnected security that shifts administrative responsibilities to the enterprise IT or cyber security team.
• Traditional anti-virus solutions use signature-based detection to find viruses, which puts the company at risk if an employee has not updated the software. Endpoint security services, on the other hand, leverage the cloud to update themselves automatically. In addition, using other technologies, such as behavioral analysis, previously unidentified threats can be discovered based on suspicious behavior.

Best practices to strengthen your Endpoint Security

IT and security teams often manage multiple security solutions for endpoints, servers, and cloud workloads and numerous detection and response solutions. This requires time to manage and learn from new product interfaces, or due to the high number of alerts, overlook the most important ones or those that require manual investigation.

To combat these issues and facilitate optimal security outcomes, there are four key factors:

1. Deploy automated patches: This helps ensure that all endpoint devices are up to date with the latest security patches. To do this, various tools can be used to automate the application process, such as patch management systems (PMS) that automate operating systems and software patching.
2. Combine Endpoint Security with SIEM: Endpoints generate numerous logs, including user data, operating systems, and security application events. By combining them with a security information and event management (SIEM) solution, these logs can be processed into meaningful and actionable events.
3. Create a single security solution for a hybrid environment: Most enterprises leverage public clouds to store their data and workloads. This hybrid approach provides flexibility as well as complexity, so as you move everything to the cloud, look for a solution that ensures compliance and unified security for all elements involved.
4. Train your employees: internal training and awareness are crucial points in ensuring that employees use terminals that access corporate networks and data by organizational and regulatory standards. This training will be a differentiating factor in protecting them against phishing attacks and other social engineering techniques.

Why is Endpoint Security Critical to Your Business?

As it becomes more complex for organizations to protect their endpoints, it is imperative to have a single dashboard to view inventory, verify detections, act to mitigate risks, and manage policies for all endpoints.

A reliable endpoint software solution offers numerous benefits that make it an attractive investment for an enterprise. These solutions monitor and protect all operating endpoints on a network through a centralized management console that is installed on a network or servers. Advanced security threats can be detected and managed appropriately.

As mentioned above, one of the most important reasons is that it helps you protect your devices from potential threats, including ransomware, malware, viruses, and other malicious software that can cause serious damage to your operations, saving you money and time in the long run.

Advanced endpoint security tools leverage ML and AI to provide fast, accurate threat detection and analysis in near real-time. This ensures that security solutions keep pace with an ever-evolving threat landscape.

These solutions include vulnerable endpoint discovery, multi-factor authentication, user behavior analysis, encryption, and real-time monitoring. This provides end-to-end visibility of endpoints, as well as the implementation of security controls.

Enterprise Endpoint Protection

In today’s business world, data is a company’s most valuable asset, and losing that data or having it accessed by outsiders could put the entire company at risk.

Businesses also have to cope with increasing endpoints and new types of endpoints. These factors make it challenging to keep a company secure and are compounded by remote working and BYOD policies, which make perimeter security more fragile and prone to vulnerabilities.

Additionally, the threat landscape is becoming more complicated as hackers launch new and more sophisticated attacks. The cost of reallocating resources to counter threats, the reputational cost of a large-scale breach, or the financial cost of compliance breaches are just a few examples of the importance of these protection systems.

That’s why an endpoint protection platform is a vital part of enterprise cyber security for several reasons. At Plain Concepts, we are very aware of the consequences of a data breach; that’s why we have the best team of experts to help our clients face the new challenges of the digital era.

The National Cryptologic Centre (CCN) has accredited us as an Implementing Entity of CCN-STIC Guides, a unique recognition in Spain, which makes us leaders in developments to eliminate vulnerabilities and strengthen the security of all types of data hosted in the cloud.

We propose a Zero Trust approach, which assumes security breaches and potential data leakage and verifies each request as coming from an uncontrolled network. With this model, each access request is strongly authenticated, authorized within the constraints of the access policy, and inspected for anomalies before granting access. Everything from the user’s identity to the environment where the application resides is used to prevent breaches.

In addition, AI and analytics help us identify what has happened, what has been compromised, and how to prevent it from happening again. If you want to protect one of the fundamental pillars of your organization and your employees, make an appointment with our experts, and we will study your case.