How to Secure Your Endpoints?

Endpoints are tablets, computers, smartphones or servers that are connected with a corporate network. These are the most vulnerable components in any computing environment. Still, most organizations don’t worry about their endpoints. Hackers can use these devices to get access to your organization network. According to a report by Absolute Software, more than 70% of security breaches happen due to unsecured endpoints.

There is no single solution that will protect your whole organization against the variety of vulnerabilities it could face. You can improve your protection by using software and hardware that provides multiple layers of security. The cost, manpower and time required to implement these solutions is a huge investment for any business. However, your employees won’t always stay inside the office parameter. If your endpoint devices are not secured, then hackers can easily bypass your security system. Thus, it is very important to secure your endpoints.

Importance of Endpoint Security

Any device like laptop, tablet or smartphone provides an entry point for hackers. Endpoint Security aims to secure all the endpoints that are connected to your network. This will make sure that hackers can’t use these endpoints to hack your network. Most of the companies are adopting practices like Bring your device (BYOD) and mobile/remote employees. This has significantly increased the number of endpoint devices.

Due to this, the need for effective endpoint security solutions is increasing. Most of the employees use their smartphones or laptops to connect to their enterprise networks. Thus, you can’t use a centralized security solution to protect your network.

5 Methods to secure your endpoints

1. Do the basics well

First, you need to make sure that your employees know about the best security practices. You should educate them about the best tried-and-tested security principals. Make sure that they are using complex passwords to access their devices. Don’t give administrator rights to any of your users. Also, make sure that your employees are regularly downloading security patches in their device. This will make sure that all their devices are secured. You can also enforce a security configuration policy to secure your endpoints.

According to a report by Ponemon, more than 80% of attacks are successful due to careless employees. Thus, it is very important to teach your employees about security basics. They should know about how to protect themselves from phishing. You need to build a culture of security in your enterprise.

2. Know about your Endpoints

You can’t protect your endpoints if you don’t know about them. Thus, you must never allow all your employee devices to connect to your network. Make sure that only approved devices can connect to your company network. You can assess every device patching and vulnerability status before granting them access. If you know all your endpoints, then you can easily prioritize them according to their threat level. Every device connected to the internet is vulnerable to threats.

3. Deploy Automated and Advanced Endpoint Protection

Most companies think that traditional anti-virus can protect their endpoints. Anti-virus is important for protecting your endpoints against viruses. But, they can’t defend your endpoints from hackers. Thus, you must opt for an integrated endpoint security solution. These solutions must cover the entire threat spectrum by offering various features like application whitelisting, analysis; windows log collection, support, and real-time protection.

4. Protection against unknown and known threats

Most security products can only detect known vulnerabilities before they enter any network. In most cases, by the time your security products find an unknown threat, your important data has already been stolen. The detection of unknown threats is too late in most of the security products. Also, most hackers often reuse their old exploit techniques and malware. But, they can also modify the attack to avoid detection. Thus, most of the threats are undetected by security products.

Detection on the endpoint or network is time-consuming and inefficient. This issue can be avoided if both your endpoint and network can detect unknown and known threats. Your endpoint security solution should be capable of detecting both threats. They should use various prevention methods and analysis to maximize effectiveness.

5. Automate Response and Detection

Hackers have scalability, automation and specialized tools that can take down your network. According to a survey by Ponemon, more than 70% of hackers are using automated hacking tools. These tools help them in successfully executing hundreds of attacks. An entire marketplace exists where you can buy automated tools at a very affordable price.

To defend against these attacks companies mostly use solutions that are very complex and inefficient. If you want to outpace hackers, then you must make successful attacks more difficult. According to the Ponemon survey, if an attack is taking more than 35 hours to conduct then attackers will leave your network. The best way to achieve this is by using automated prevention.

Detection on both endpoint and network is difficult if you need a security expert to investigate every alert. Automation will make your company a difficult target for hackers. They need to invest more money and resources in hacking your system. Thus, hackers will move on to some other victim.

Conclusion

In today’s world, it is very hard to protect your enterprise from hacking attacks. There are hundreds of unknown vulnerability exploits and malware. Thus, it is very important to protect your endpoints from attackers. You can contact Bleuwire professionals for advanced endpoint protection. They will use multi-method prevention to protect your endpoint from hackers.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.