Best Endpoint Protection for Business (EPP) Solutions

Enterprise endpoint protection is a technology solution used to protect devices from malicious behavior, malware, and suspicious applications, and also to identify security incidents and provide alerts. By allowing admins to manage all corporate devices, enterprise endpoint protection helps them recognize threats, remediate against those threats, and thus easily and quickly respond to security issues. Enterprise endpoint protection emerged to replace traditional antivirus software and offers prevention methods that work to pre-emptively block known and unknown threats.

1. Prevention: One of the main key requirements for securing endpoints is to pre-emptively block both known and unknown threats. With the number of security breaches rapidly increasing, it is helpful to not only detect and respond to incidents after they’ve occurred but to prevent them from happening in the first place. To achieve this, organizations can incorporate either local or cloud-based threat analysis to identify as well as prevent unknown and evasive threats.
2. No interruption on user productivity: An endpoint security solution should not negatively impact user productivity in any way. End users should be able to use mobile and/or cloud-based technologies without worrying about known or unknown cyber threats and without fear of compromising their systems.
3. Threat intelligence: Companies can collect threat data to enable prevention automatically. This data can be gathered from the network, the cloud, and endpoints. Once collected, automation can be used to correlate the data. In turn, this can help identify indicators of compromise in order to create protections and alert the organization.
4. Application protection: An organization should have a security infrastructure that provides protection of core applications, including proprietary and third-party applications. If applications are not protected and they have bugs or security flaws, it hinders an organization’s ability to function effectively, and also gives cyber attackers a rather large attack surface.
5. Security and system performance: Security products should not interfere with system resources (RAM, CPU, disk storage, etc.). If an endpoint protection solution is not lightweight, it can burden a system’s performance and also jeopardize the user experience.
6. Secure legacy systems: Oftentimes, organizations may delay the deployment of system updates or security patches to prevent interfering with critical operational capabilities or for other reasons - such as patches not being available for certain legacy systems. A good endpoint security solution will support systems that can't be patched and will not hamper software vulnerabilities.
7. Enterprise-ready: To suit your enterprise environment best, an endpoint security solution should be flexible, scalable, and easily manageable. It should be able to flawlessly integrate with an enterprise’s existing computing resources, it should scale to countless endpoints, and it should be able to be deployed within different environments, whether those environments are geographically dispersed or not. It is also important that it supports all business needs and offers great flexibility in case one part of an organization differs from another.
8. Industry compliance requirements: Endpoint security solutions can help achieve and maintain compliance requirements. Endpoints provide independent verification for industry compliance requirements, are proactively protected, and also replace antivirus solutions that have already been put into place.
9. Independent verification as antivirus replacement: Ideally, an endpoint security protection product that is being used to replace a traditional legacy antivirus solution should be verified by an independent third party to evaluate its performance. An independent third party can conduct a deeper check than an organization can, especially when determining which security product is best as an antivirus replacement for you.
10. Recognition: It is recommended that the endpoint security protection you select to replace traditional antivirus solutions should be recognized by either a top-tier industry analyst or a research firm.

Below are 5 different ways to protect an endpoint:

1. Protect employee endpoints using anti-virus software and multi-factor authentication. Additionally, make sure application updates are automated to secure client data.
2. Minimize data to prevent accidental loss by removing customer and employee data that is unnecessary.
3. Consider deploying comprehensive security measures across all devices, data, and applications. A solution that includes behavior analytics will alert your IT team of suspicious activity before it becomes problematic.
4. Check that all licensing and certifications are up to date and reflect the most recent regulatory and compliance standards.
5. If your company has added new resources such as mobile, IoT, or on-premise resources, it is crucial to update these network infrastructure changes within your security and recovery plans.

Endpoint protection provides layers of defense that safeguard organizations from cyber threats, large or small. It enables an extra level of visibility into the threat landscape to understand the root cause of endpoint attacks. The goal of endpoint protection is to provide security from malware attacks, to gain insight into malicious activities and behaviors, and to provide the capabilities needed to investigate and remediate threats and incidents.

Some of the most common endpoint protection benefits include:

• Zero-day threat detection in near real time via machine learning.
• Ensure safe browsing on the web with proactive web security.
• Prevention of data loss.
• Hostile network attacks can be avoided due to integrated firewalls.
• Insider threat protection to guard against malicious activity.
• Having a centralized management platform for endpoint protection helps improve visibility and also helps simplify operations. Increased visibility can also shed light on security gaps that may have otherwise been overlooked.
• Customer engagement improves when endpoints are protected from threats.
• Endpoint security makes it easy for IT teams to detect unpatched devices.
• With endpoint security, your organization can rest assured that data access is authenticated, and therefore is controlled.

When evaluating endpoint security products, IT Central Station (soon to be Peerspot) users are clear on what aspects are most important. Proactive protection is a clear indication of superior quality in an EPP solution, since the days of reactive protection are gone. Another essential feature to look for is the capability to block a variety of attack vectors, since testing with known malware simply isn't sufficient. Additionally, our members want to see good customer support, easy installation and removal, and competitive pricing in an endpoint security product.