Endpoint protection
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5 Essential factors to consider while selecting end-protection tool for your business

5 Mins read

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and a few minutes of cyber-incident to ruin it.” – Stéphane Nappo, Global Chief Information Security Officer, Groupe SEB.

Endpoint security is an important part of any organization’s cybersecurity today. Therefore, endpoint protection tools are essential as they help businesses to get protection from complex malware and zero-day threats. Before proceeding further, let’s first clear the basics.

What is an endpoint?

An endpoint is any device or node that serves as a source or destination for communication over a network. Examples of endpoints include:

• Desktop computers
• Laptops
• Tablets
• Smartphones
• Printers
• Servers
• ATM machines
• Internet-of-things (IoT) devices

But they do not typically include devices designed to manage and forward data communication, such as:

• Routers
• Gateways
• Firewalls
• Load balancers

The concept of an endpoint has played an increasingly important role in cybersecurity in recent years. This has largely been the result of the growing trend toward remote work and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies.

To select an end-protection tool for your business, you need to consider various factors. Let’s take a look at the 5 basic factors that you need to consider for improving endpoint compliance and get better protection against cyber-attacks.

Why is Endpoint Protection Important?

Before we start, we need to know why endpoint protection tools are important.

All endpoint devices are simple input devices, connected to the network via the Internet. They may be managed by the humans or fully automated and collect critical information from centralized control points. Endpoint devices include the devices mentioned in the first section. If unauthorized users get access to these endpoint devices, they can pull off sensitive or critical information.

Endpoint protection is important as it ensures that all your endpoint devices are adhering to certain security and safety policies. It can help businesses increase productivity and boost operational excellence. Without proper endpoint security, businesses can face the risk of data loss and penalties.

Credit: Acronis

How Does the Endpoint Protection Tools Work?

The specific operational capabilities of each EDR solution varies from vendor to vendor. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is a technology that provides your security teams with the tools they need to detect and respond to threats to your systems as and when they happen. However, they should all provide the same core functionality to help you through the following three phases of dealing with a security incident.

Credit: Acronis

Detection phase

EDR systems collect a lot of data and can generate a lot of alerts. To help keep noise to a minimum, they should: Automatically respond to known indicators of compromise (IOCs) and contain or remediate the impact of any corresponding malicious endpoint activity in real time.

• Deliver all endpoint telemetry to a central incident management console to aid incident evaluation and avoid duplicate work.

• Correlate alerts to security incidents, providing you with contextual information that you can quickly piece together to form of a clear picture of the attack.

Prioritization phase

Using these insights, you should be able to determine:

• How the perpetrator initiated the attack
• Any lateral movement of the attacker through your network
• The impact of the attack on your business
• The corrective steps you’ll need to take
• The level of priority relative to other ongoing incidents
• Whether you need to carry out any additional investigation

Response phase

EDR platforms also offer a range of features for managing your response to a security incident. For example, they should provide you with the ability to:

• Stop and contain the attack
• Quickly and efficiently roll back endpoints to their pre-infected state
• Remediate the vulnerability the attacker exploited and apply lessons learned from the attack
• Create automated playbooks for similar attacks
• Monitor endpoints after restore to prevent recurring breaches

Important Factors to consider while selecting end-point protection tool

Now we will dig into the main factors to be considered before choosing the right endpoint tool for protecting your business.

1. Prevention Capabilities:

Your endpoint protection solution must have the best defense features of today. As such, your endpoint protection tool must come along with the right combination of prevention capabilities. This includes advanced intrusion detection, full visibility, and prevention solution for malware, spyware, ransomware, zero-day threats, and more.

2. Response and Data Recovery Capabilities:

Choose a reliable tool that can remove all traces of an attack. The solution should be able to quickly recover data, backup all information automatically which is required to restore each system such as data, operating system, applications, etc. It should backup all systems on a weekly basis or more often in case of sensitive information.

3. Sandboxing Capability:

Sandboxing is a technique used by organizations, wherein they replicate the behaviour of real end user systems to run malicious files without affecting the network, intended to detect malware. To assess malware, sandboxes enable organizations to run multiple code evaluation processes using different technologies and operating systems. Your endpoint protection solution must come along with sandboxing capability for static and dynamic analysis.

4. Integration Capability:

It is important to check if the security tool you’re selecting integrates well with your organization’s security architecture. If it works separately, then you may experience network and infrastructure related issues leading to new security vulnerabilities later. So, always pick an endpoint security solution which integrates well with your entire security architecture.

5. Business Intelligence and Analytics Capability:

Like other IT solutions, endpoint protection tools are increasingly becoming advanced by using smart technologies such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and other intelligent technologies. Using these technologies, end-point protection solutions are able to perform AI/ML based malware detection, anomaly detection, behavior monitoring, or root cause analysis.

A good example can be Acronis – which holistically protects enterprise data both within the data center and at the edge and endpoints. It prevents cyber-attacks using AI/ML and security analytics.

Acronis’ Endpoint Protection Tools to integrate across your environment

1. Acronis Cyber Protect

Acronis Cyber Protect is a solution that natively integrates cybersecurity, data protection and management to protect endpoints, systems, and data. It provides enhanced protection against malware and ransomware.

The product integrates anti-ransomware, anti cryptomining, and a full-stack anti-virus solution by leveraging artificial intelligence-based detection as well as a behavioral engine that identifies unusual processes behavior. Additionally, the service also includes URL filtering, vulnerability assessments and patch management.

Overall, Acronis Cyber Protect provides customers with a streamlined offering, enabling them to handle the full spectrum of data protection, cybersecurity, and IT management tasks without having to integrate separate services from multiple vendors.

This type of tool can be extremely useful for those looking for layered protection.

2. Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office is a true cyber protection solution that goes beyond a simple backup or antivirus. It protects all your digital devices from all kinds of cyber threats. A unique integration of data protection and cybersecurity solution, it blocks cyber-attacks in real-time with regular antivirus scans powered by Machine Learning.

AV-Test ran test on Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. More than antivirus, more than backup, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office showed detection rate of 100%. AV-Test.org is a respected German security institute known for putting anti-malware solutions to test.

However, every business has different security needs so the best end-protection tool will depend on them. Follow the steps mentioned above and accordingly, choose a solution that is based on your requirements and budget.

Read Next: What is Privacy Engineering and how it acts as an enabler of Digital Innovation?

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About author
Priyanka Dadhich – a content writer, can usually be found reading books. She likes to write about technology, healthcare, travel and fashion. Priyanka loves coffee and listens to music in her free time. She spends her free time with her family.
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