In today’s world of rapidly evolving threats, there is only one choice for companies that want to gain an advantage over attackers – and that’s an endpoint security platform that runs in the cloud. The cloud provides a cost-effective, continually up-to-date solution that can alleviate the pressure on you and your security team – all while providing better protection for your organization. The cloud can solve the most common problems caused by traditional approaches because it has much more processing, storage and analytics power than any onpremise solution.
1. Problem: Keeping up to Date
One of the first big problems with on-premise security solutions is the fact that software changes regularly, and therefore needs to be updated frequently. With lots of disparate solutions – and a quickly evolving threat landscape – keeping everything up to date is no small feat.
Solution: The Cloud Simplifies and Automates Updates
The cloud streamlines endpoint security management through a centralized, managed infrastructure that is much simpler, more accurate and less time-consuming for you and your IT staff. With your security in the cloud, every endpoint becomes part of a global threat monitoring system with real-time threat intelligence that is shared across all endpoints and configuration that is largely automated through big data analytics. The cloud can automatically and proactively adapt to new attacks and keep your endpoints up to date and protected. You can also safely leverage new and updated features as soon as they are released, which frees you up to focus on more pressing security issues.
2. Problem: Integrating Security Products
Many organizations have significant security investments beyond endpoint protection in products such as security information and event management (SIEM), analytics, network security and threat intelligence. Complexity arises when these solutions don’t work together: each product is controlled independently, storing independent copies of similar data and managing isolated workflows that create friction within processes and between teams. Without a single, unified view of your environment across all your security products, the overall value of each individual product is greatly reduced.
Solution: Cloud APIs and Pre-built Integrations Unify Products
You’ll get the best protection when you have comprehensive access to all your security data – and this is where the cloud comes in. With the cloud, you can take advantage of standardized open APIs that help you integrate endpoint security with the rest of your defense stack. Look for cloud-based security products that come with seamless, pre-built integrations to tie products together and give you the ability to integrate your endpoint security with your own custom-built systems and tools. You can even develop custom workflows and automate practices for any scenario. This collective defense strategy improves your visibility because critical endpoint data is shared across the security stack. This increases the efficiency of your analysis and response to threats, and maximizes your investments in your existing security products.
3. Problem: Managing Multiple Agents
Having an array of security solutions presents yet another problem: each solution comes with unique and individual endpoint agents, policies and configurations. That means for every agent you deploy, you need to keep track of where it’s deployed, how it is configured, what it is doing and what issues it may cause.
Solution: The Cloud Enables a Single Consolidated Agent
The cloud consolidates disparate solutions easily with multiple security functions on a single agent. Integrated policies keep all endpoints current, and a single, centralized console integrates all workflows. The cloud’s single agent collects enormous amounts of valuable data once, which is then analyzed in the cloud and leveraged for smarter, more proactive protection across a variety of security services. As a result, you have one agent that performs the tasks of many. All of this is easy to deploy and configure through the cloud, so services can be added without the need for entirely new and different solutions. Plus, with a fully converged agent, you can eliminate products on your endpoints that you no longer need, which in turn reduces the impact on your employees.
4. Problem: Securing Remote Workers
Almost every company has remote workers today. However, traditional security solutions were not built to secure endpoints outside the corporate network. Whether employees are around the corner, in a branch office or halfway around the globe, protecting them with traditional endpoint security can be problematic.
Solution: The Cloud Treats Every Endpoint the Same
The cloud eliminates the need for endpoints to connect back to the corporate network. It consistently protects every single endpoint, no matter whether the user is on the corporate network or halfway around the world. With the cloud, your endpoints all connect to the same, cloud-based service for configuration and updates – so they are all treated equally, with all the latest protection. As a result, all your assets are easily kept current and compliant, and you retain complete control of all your endpoints.
5. Problem: Slowing Down Endpoints
The last thing you want is unhappy users – but with traditional antivirus running in the background and inhibiting their productivity, that’s what you’re going to get.
Solution: Cloud Processing Keeps the Agent Lightweight
With the cloud, your users won’t even notice the impact endpoint security is having because there is only one lightweight agent on their endpoints that performs all security processes without draining computing resources. Complex tasks are offloaded to the cloud where its unlimited storage and processing power can do the heavy lifting, making for an optimized experience and leaving users happy and productive. And you get all the visibility you need to keep endpoints protected, drastically reducing or even eliminating the need for re-imaging.
6. Problem: Preventing New Attacks
With the volume and severity of unknown attacks today, uncertainty and lack of visibility has become the new norm in cybersecurity. Traditional antivirus can only stop and prevent known malware attacks, which only accounts for 30% of today’s attacks.
Solution: The cloud leverages big data and sophisticated analytics to predict attacks
Big data analytics in the cloud is the future of security – and it’s your best opportunity to fully protect your organization. By capturing real-time activity data from all your endpoints and analyzing it for malicious behavior, the cloud effectively creates a global threat monitoring system. With sophisticated machine learning and analytic processes that study behaviors, file reputations, threat feeds and other sources of information, the cloud proactively identifies anomalies as they occur. Predictive models are generated and streamed down to the endpoint, allowing local systems to predict new threats and prevent unknown malicious behavior without signatures or pre-existing knowledge of the specific threat. This data-driven model of prediction and prevention is an important requirement for protecting endpoints from the types of sophisticated attacks we are seeing today and will see for the next several years.
7. Problem: Identifying Problems
The adage “you can’t fix what you can’t see” applies here. Endpoints generate a lot of activity – in fact, a single endpoint can generate between 10,000 and 40,000 individual events on a daily basis.
Solution: The Cloud Analyzes Unfiltered Endpoint Data to Give You the Visibility You Need
The cloud accelerates your ability to zero in on new attacks and take immediate action. You can quickly analyze unfiltered data, whether related to a threat or not. Streaming analytics connects these endpoint events together to give you a clear picture of what happened and when. This allows you to gain complete real-time visibility into all threat-related activity while identifying priority issues. You can see how attacks behave, what else is affected in your environment, where an attack might have spread and even identify the root causes within minutes. You can also get a broader picture of trends and patterns, so you can remediate future attacks more rapidly, without delays. And you can clearly communicate the state of your endpoints and the success of your security program to your management team.
8. Problem: Responding Quickly to Threats
Speed is a big factor in effective endpoint security. When attacks occur, you want to see the problem, find the root cause and contain the situation – fast. But if you are unsure of when or where an attack started, it’s difficult to respond quickly and efficiently, especially if the attackers are moving faster than you are remediating.
Solution: The Cloud Enables Real-time Investigation and Remediation
With the velocity of the cloud, you have the power to respond quickly, almost instantaneously. You can immediately identify problems, see where they started and stop them in near-real time, no matter where in the world the endpoint is. With real-time, live operational tools built directly into a cloudbased endpoint security system, you have centralized, secure remote access to endpoints for response and remediation. The cloud gives you the most efficient way to take corrective action to defend against attacks as they happen.
9. Problem: Getting the Help You Need
Gone are the days when viruses were created by individual hackers for no other reason than to prove they could. Today there are reportedly over one million paid cybercriminals that are behind the incessant, nonstop attacks organizations face each day. Cybercriminals operate within a large black market economy, working together to enrich themselves and the people they work for. How can you – whether you are a staff of one security professional or even a staff of 40 – combat that?
Solution: The Cloud Facilitates Collaboration and Education
The cloud is there when you need help, as it gives you access to broad and deep collaboration that goes beyond your own enterprise. By its very nature, the cloud can quickly connect you with thousands of global security experts that share best practices, compromise indicators and intelligence about emerging threats in real time. Your cloud-based endpoint security vendor can help you access this network of defenders. These security professionals continually research new threats, share their findings and build best-in-class security products to help organizations like yours. So when you are under attack from a new unknown threat, you can solve issues faster as you tap into this global resource of knowledge and expertise.
10. Problem: Managing Infrastructure
Whether you have one on-premise solution or ten, the management required to keep all your endpoint security products up to date can be complex and costly. From an operations point of view, an on-premise infrastructure requires costly capital expenditures (capex) for servers, storage and networks, all of which become obsolete quickly as new technology emerges. And even if they are kept current, there is often limited computing, storage and analytics power on-site, so your ability to fully protect your endpoints is constricted.
Solution: The Cloud Facilitates Collaboration and Education
When you turn to the cloud, you get the immediate benefit of an entire managed operation whose only job is keeping that application running, updated and secure. You can focus on security, without the complications that come with a self-managed infrastructure. Finances are easier, since the cloud’s operational expenditure (opex) model does not require a longterm capital investment. The cloud’s management model greatly simplifies operations, with seamless updates to your software and hardware, turning around new capabilities faster than you can on-premise. And all that massive-scale big data processing is configured, deployed and managed for you. Plus, a cloud solution is elastic in nature, so you can easily scale the number of endpoints up and down as your organization grows.