Easier Management with Integrated Endpoint Security

Integration matters. We at McAfee have been advocating the administrative benefits of integrated, centrally managed endpoint security for decades, but you don’t just have to take our word for it. A recent independently written article in BizTech Magazine concurs.

BizTech explores technology and business issues that IT leaders and business managers face when they’re evaluating and implementing solutions. In “Businesses Find Endpoint Security Easier to Manage with Integrated Solutions,” journalist Kym Gilhooly references a number of independent security surveys as well as interviews a CISO, an IT manager, and a network administrator at three different companies. Each of these cybersecurity professionals and their respective small and medium-sized companies came to the conclusion that, to defend against today’s breadth of threats—from signature-based to zero-day, known and unknown— an integrated security approach combining endpoint detection and response (EDR), next-generation antivirus, and application control makes more sense than deploying discrete solutions.

Uniting these technologies in one integrated solution has allowed them to take action across the threat defense lifecycle—from detecting and blocking threats and whitelisting critical applications to tracking down malicious exploits during or before execution and helping incident response teams respond and remediate faster. As CISO Tony Taylor of dairy company Land O’Lakes points out in the article, “There are lots of security tools out there, but if you don’t integrate the stack, you’ve got to associate all that information and make the connections yourself.”

EDR Becoming an Integral Component of Endpoint Security

All the companies interviewed by Gilhooly affirm the importance of EDR in their security defense. As an IT manager at a 500-employee retail company states in the article, “The days when IT took a set-it-and-forget-it approach to endpoint security are over.” The ability to quickly investigate threats—whether reactively seeking to understand where a threat originated, how it spread and what damage it caused, or proactively hunting for anomalous behavior and dormant threats—is becoming a must-have tool to shrink the response and remediation gap.

What’s more, the article recognizes that an integrated EDR-EPP (endpoint protection software) solution makes much more sense than bolting on an EDR point solution. That’s because EDR and EPP can enhance each other’s effectiveness. For instance, if a company uses McAfee Endpoint Security or SaaS-based McAfee MVISION Endpoint alongside McAfee MVISION EDR, when the EPP part of the integrated solution detects anomalous behavior on an endpoint—but not enough to convict it—an analyst can use EDR to enrich the data, subsequently raising or lowering the incident’s severity ranking. On the flip side, when the EDR part detects an unknown threat in the environment, the analyst can query the threat reputation database and share new threat information instantly across endpoints via the EPP.

The more cyberdefense tools can collaborate and be managed as a unified solution, the more actions can be automated, IT staff burdens reduced, and time freed up for more proactive forensics and other activities.

In short, the BizTech article reiterates what we’ve been saying: Integration is more than just a buzzword. It’s time to stop thinking about EDR as an add-on, or EPP and EDR as separate entities. It’s also time to start moving endpoint security to the cloud. The article touches on that, too.

To learn more about effective endpoint security strategy, be sure to follow us @McAfee and @McAfee_Business.

 

“There are lots of security tools out there, but if you don’t integrate the stack, you’ve got to associate all that information and make the connections yourself.”

— Land O’Lakes CISO Tony Taylor (as quoted in BizTech)

 

 

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Story added 5. September 2019, content source with full text you can find at link above.