“What you don’t know can’t hurt you” is not exactly the phrase you want to associate with your business. In fact, what you don’t know can seriously harm your business in terms of security. With 66% of organizations experiencing increased endpoint threats, proper endpoint monitoring has become crucial to scrutinize all suspicious activities and achieve robust endpoint security.

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This guide will provide insights into the following areas:

• What Is Endpoint Monitoring?
• General Purpose
• Key Capabilities
• Primary Benefits
• Questions To Ask
• Challenges

What Is Endpoint Monitoring?

Endpoint monitoring is the process of systematically tracking all endpoint activities within your network to detect malicious threats. The system collects, aggregates and analyzes endpoint behaviors to monitor your devices continuously. It defines what normal behavior is and helps recognize any deviations from it.

Additionally, endpoint monitoring and management help run business operations smoothly and mitigate any disruptions in mobile device management (MDM). You can also discover and prevent network security issues like unsecured open ports.

General Purpose

Earlier, business operations were relatively simpler, with a few on-premise servers connected to a set of PCs, easy network configurations and fewer network hosts. You could manage them with manual endpoint monitoring and management.

However, today’s businesses depend not only on physical servers but also on an array of cloud-based storage devices and virtual machines. There are multiple mobile devices connected to the framework, and network configurations frequently change whenever devices come and go offline.

These endpoints form a permeable perimeter susceptible to advanced threats like polymorphic malware, phishing attacks, ransomware and advanced persistent threats. Most of these threats are not detectable by traditional security systems like endpoint antivirus.

Regular endpoint monitoring provides in-depth visibility into your security environment. It allows IT and cyber security professionals to track network locations and monitor information such as the location of endpoints in the network, what software is running on these entities, which network ports are exposed and so on.

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Key Capabilities

Personally identifiable information (PII) and intellectual properties can make businesses prone to attacks. Endpoint monitoring can minimize such threats with capabilities like:

Intelligence-driven Detection

This feature helps security teams learn from cyber attackers. You can identify the attacker’s processes, motivations and behaviors to find a pattern and create remediation plans.

Behavioral Analysis

You can automatically analyze endpoint behavior and detect any unusual patterns using AI and machine learning. Get insights into indicators of attack (IOAs) to prevent future attacks of the same kind.

Anomalies and outliers deviate from the general pattern in data sets to distort predicted outcomes and create vulnerabilities. With endpoint monitoring services, you can detect them using behavioral analysis.

Data Encryption

You can find devices that store unencrypted data, transform this readable data into unreadable ciphers and safeguard it with a password or encryption key. This capability helps protect sensitive information like client records, PIIs and source codes.

Regular Software Updates

Outdated software can make your security systems vulnerable and put your business data to risk by falling prey to advanced cyberattacks. You can hunt devices with unpatched software and update them regularly.

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Primary Benefits

Improve Employee Experience

Employees expect their mobile devices to be protected, safe and reliable. According to a survey, 91% of employees are unsatisfied with the workspace technology provided. If a device lags or performs slowly, it can adversely affect their performance.

Endpoint monitoring improves employee experience by providing the best conditions for their devices. This decreases server downtime and increases overall productivity for your company.

Maintain Proper Cyber Hygiene

Most cyberattacks result from not addressing security vulnerabilities at the right time and ignoring cyber hygiene. Endpoint monitoring provides visibility into endpoints, establishing more robust risk management and security. It also keeps your system patches up-to-date to minimize vulnerability to attacks.

Save Costs

Defending your systems against security threats is itself a cost-saving measure. Infected systems, server downtime and DDoS attacks cause not only data loss but also huge costs to recover. A survey found that the impact of DDoS on enterprise organizations can cost up to $50,000. Regularly monitoring your systems can help prevent such attacks and save money and resources.

Increase Network Transparency

Endpoint monitoring equips organizations to better understand what is happening throughout their network. It helps answer questions such as which type of devices are present in the network, how many of them are active, the timing of their usage, what percentage of bandwidth each device consumes and more.

Secure Remote Working Environment

The pandemic and subsequent lockdowns forced organizations to embrace remote working and work-from-home policies, enormously impacting the cybersecurity sector. According to a survey, 49% of employees work in a fully remote environment. This sudden change increased the usage of personal devices for work, exposing endpoints to several security vulnerabilities. Also, BYOD policies increase the chances of data breaches and hacking.

You can ensure a safe and efficient remote working environment by keeping track of all employee mobile devices. Get proactive maintenance, timely updates and alerts about outdated software and suspicious activities. You can also assess user experience to enable the best working environment.

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Questions To Ask

Visibility is one of the most critical factors for efficient endpoint monitoring. You must answer some key visibility questions to get adequate insights into your systems, helping you effectively monitor the entire network.

• Are all endpoint devices authorized?
• Who is using these devices?
• Is there malware on any user’s device?
• What’s the threat history of these endpoints?
• Is any user using a USB port?
• Is traffic adhering to normal behavior patterns?
• Is any device sharing unauthorized or malicious files?

Challenges

All good things come with their fair share of challenges, and endpoint monitoring is no different. Here are some drawbacks of implementing endpoint monitoring solutions:

• Along with early threat detection, you need skilled cybersecurity experts to manage endpoint monitoring systems round-the-clock. These modules can add more cost to your cybersecurity budget.
• Endpoint monitoring creates huge numbers of alerts that can be difficult for in-house security teams to manage.
• Adequate threat intelligence, like the MITRE ATT&CK framework, is crucial to discover advanced threats. Unfortunately, many vendors don’t provide such modules with EDR solutions.
• Lack of adequate resources can cause alert fatigue, desensitizing your cybersecurity professionals. Also, expensive systems can become outdated quickly. These problems make your defense system weak and expose it to cyber threats. To bridge the gap, organizations are outsourcing security services to save costs and free their in-house IT teams.

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Final Thoughts

To stay competitive in the digital marketplace, you need to implement cloud-based systems, IoT and mobile devices. However, each device comes with vulnerabilities that, if left unchecked, can ruin your business. Traditional endpoint security solutions lack the threat intelligence and visibility required for tracking endpoints activities in real time.

You must choose the right endpoint monitoring solution to streamline business operations, efficiently manage remote work and save costs. Keep your business requirements in mind to select an ideal vendor. You can try our free comparison guide to compare leading security systems.

Which solution do you use for endpoint monitoring? Which capabilities and benefits do you find the most important? Do let us know in the comments below!