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A Comprehensive Approach to Securing and Managing Endpoints
Introduction
As today’s IT professionals know all too well, managing the dynamics of their endpoint infrastructure is a challenging task. Organizations now face a threat landscape that involves stealthy, targeted, and financially motivated attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in endpoint devices. Many of these sophisticated threats can evade traditional security solutions, leaving organizations vulnerable to data theft and manipulation, disruption of business-critical services, and damage to corporate brand and reputation.
Traditionally, administrators have made sure that each endpoint has antivirus, antispyware, desktop firewall, intrusion prevention, and device control technologies installed on it. But deploying these security products individually on each endpoint is not only time-consuming, it also increases IT complexity and costs. Organizations then need to provide management, training, and support for a variety of different endpoint security solutions
This article outlines a new approach to securing and managing the enterprise endpoint computing environment.
Business problems at the endpoint
The IT department at a typical enterprise these days finds itself fighting some pretty fierce fires:
- Endpoint management costs are increasing The cost of downtime impacts both productivity and revenue. According to a recent study by Infonetics Research, network downtime caused by security attacks is costing large enterprises upwards of $30 million a year. In addition, the costs to acquire, manage, and administer point products are increasing, as is demand on system resources.
- Complexity is increasing as well The manpower required to manage disparate endpoint protection technologies is inefficient and time-consuming. Also, differing technologies can often work against one another or impede system performance due to high resource consumption.
- Growing number of new known and unknown threats Stealth-based and silent attacks are increasing, so there is a need for antivirus to do much more. The current threat environment is characterized by an increase in data theft and data leakage, and the creation of malicious code that targets specific organizations for information that can be used for financial gain. One gauge of the growing sophistication of attacks is the appearance of blended threats, which integrate multiple attack methods such as worms, Trojan horses, and zero-day threats.
