While the ongoing drive towards digital transformation provides new opportunities for business growth, it can also make companies more vulnerable to cyber risks. Technology trends such as the cloud, IoT and BYOD have dramatically upped the number of endpoints open to exploitation by cyber criminals.
The Ponemon Institute’s 2016 State of the Endpoint Report shows it’s become a huge challenge for businesses to identify and secure the myriad laptops, tablets and smart devices that jump onto corporate networks every day. Respondents estimate that an average of one-third of all endpoints connected to their organization’s network is not secured.
The result is that endpoints, especially laptops and smartphones, are now the most vulnerable attack vectors in the digital ecosystem — putting organizations across all sectors at a higher risk of becoming targets of malware, zero-day threats, DDoS attacks and more.
According to Ponemon, organizations struggle to balance the resources required to minimize endpoint risk and keep pace with employee demands for better device connectivity and performance.
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF THE ENDPOINTS CONNECTING TO YOUR NETWORK ARE AT RISK? HERE ARE THREE TELL-TALE SIGNS:
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Your workforce is security-blind. The Ponemon report reveals that negligent employees who fail to adhere to security policies are the single biggest threat to endpoint security. If BYOD is allowed in your workplace—this includes smartwatches and wearables that can access your network—and security policies aren’t enforced, the sheer volume of unsecured endpoints poses a huge security risk.
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Your security hasn’t kept up with network growth. If your organization’s network has expanded over time, you might have lost visibility of it—and as a result, control of your security. If you haven’t regularly assessed whether your security meets your organization’s evolving needs, the odds are high that you have a fragmented security system without any advanced capabilities such as threat intelligence sharing and rapid response. As a result, your endpoints, as well as many other segments of your system, are at risk.
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You have a limited endpoint security platform. Even if you have an endpoint security platform, chances are its capabilities are limited. For example, many platforms are only scalable up to a point, while others don’t support all types of devices and operating systems.
HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR ENDPOINT SECURITY
With the number and types of devices linking to networks changing constantly, you need the flexibility of an endpoint security platform that can secure a variety of devices, provide visibility and control of all distributed endpoints, and simplify policy enforcement as well as incident response and mitigation.
Our partner, Fortinet, delivers these capabilities with FortiClient, a robust endpoint security platform that automates advanced threat detection and prevention; while enabling you to manage different endpoint features (e.g. compliance, protection and secure access) from a single client. Interoperability with the Fortinet Enterprise Management Server and Fortigate firewall platform simplifies management and policy enforcement. And by integrating with the Fortinet Security Fabric, it provides real-time, actionable visibility to stop threats at the endpoint and network.
The digital transformation of your business must go on — but not at the expense of security. Contact VLCM to learn how we can help keep your endpoints secure and business growth on track.
