FINAL WORD
Endpoint detection response naturally seemed to be the solution to businesses security flaws , having been reaffirmed for its use after claims it was outdated .
Before the pandemic pressed pause on much of our lives and forced us to retreat to the safety of our homes , limitations of staffing was held accountable as the primary reason why 61 % of businesses weren ’ t already adopting endpoint detection response ( EDR ) solutions . In effect , the skillsets of employees couldn ’ t match up to the sophistication of the tool enough to leverage it to its full potential .
Looking ahead a few months , and with a number of days spent in lockdown , research has found that nearly three-quarters ( 73 %) of workers hadn ’ t received any additional IT security awareness training , despite a mass migration to homeworking and a panicked change of mind towards EDR ’ s adoption .
So , what changed ? In part , the accelerated transition to remote working and the desperate need to protect a dispersed device network backed enterprises into a corner . Businesses naturally felt obliged to take action and to discard their previous concerns about readiness .
At first glance , this is an understandable defence plan . By the middle of 2020 , sensors had already recorded more than 726 million cyberattacks launched on online resources , due to a struggle among IT teams to secure their now-at-home endpoints from malware . And with flexible working set to continue , IT teams need to increase the safety of their workspaces .
Endpoint detection response naturally seemed to be the solution to businesses ’ security flaws , having been reaffirmed for its use after claims it was outdated . EDR is now finding favour over traditional anti-virus and can indeed play its part in mitigating the challenges exposed by the turbulence of a year in lockdown . However , the focus now should be on ensuring that it is strategically embedded into a managed , licensed and already hardened IT environment – and not just adopted as a silver bullet .
Keeping tabs on an ever-growing EDR market
It is the rush towards EDR as an allencompassing white knight that has exposed the knowledge gap that exists in many organisations . Businesses have needed a solution and have often failed to analyse their wider digital infrastructure before leaping to its adoption .
This chain of events has been exacerbated in part by an additional , worrying trend where next-generation and firewall vendors are pushing EDR into organisations after obtaining more universal endpoint solutions . Firewall vendors are impacting the endpoint protection platform ( EPP ) market through the acquisition of EDR companies that strengthen their solution , but that are missing the comprehensibility of full EPP solutions . Instead of being enacted as part of a multi-layered EPP product , EDR as a standalone function is therefore generating alerts that then depend on behavioural detection and manual analysis . This potentially leads to an increase in false positives , and a decrease in employee productivity as workers strive to filter the urgent threats from a deluge of detected warnings .
It means that , instead of acquiring a solution to their device dispersion predicament , IT teams are facing more
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 37
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