Data security is a critical concern for any organization that relies on digital assets and networks. Cyberattacks compromise sensitive information, disrupt business operations, damage reputation, and incur legal liabilities. And these days, the collective risks of cyberattacks have become very high.
To protect data, organizations need to implement effective endpoint security solutions that can prevent, detect, and respond to threats on devices that have access to their network.
With proper Endpoint Detection and Response, many challenges to data security can be mitigated.
EDR Capabilities for Data Security
Endpoint detection and response is a key technology in data security. With the proliferation of corporate organizations with several endpoints, businesses have to understand the new risks they now face as attackers are unrelenting in their quest for crime and they will exploit every loophole they find to get what they want.
An EDR solution monitors the network for threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks emanating from endpoint devices and exists as a platform to alert stakeholders who can then coordinate or automate appropriate responses to these incidents.
An article in Security Magazine lists four primary areas where EDR solutions must be particularly effective for data security in any business organization. These capabilities are explored below in detail.
- Attack prevention – EDR solutions employ analysis algorithms and threat intelligence to automatically block known and unknown attacks. This requires constantly monitoring the network in order to keep the attack surface as small as possible.
- Incident response – breaches are bound to occur; it’s only a matter of when they will occur. When they do, there must be a way to investigate, contain, and remediate such breaches. EDR capabilities, thus, could extend to alert triage, suspicious activity validation, root cause analysis, etc. These steps are crucial to help security teams respond as quickly and decisively as possible as well as minimize the impact of an attack.
- Advanced threat detection – modern EDR solutions (and any cybersecurity tools, really) must be able to respond to modern challenges, including the adoption of AI by malicious actors in order to launch sophisticated attacks. Detecting and responding to insider attacks (malicious or unintended) and advanced persistent threats, for instance, refers to continuous monitoring and behavioral analytics, as well as other EDR features.
- Incident investigation – of course, an EDR solution is almost no good if it lacks the capacity to investigate incidents. Continuous monitoring must be a feature of any effective EDR outfit because an organization’s security team must have access to endpoint telemetry data, including events, processes, files, network connections, registry changes, and more. Nothing should go under the radar.
AI, Automation, and EDR
Endpoint Detection and Response, however, is not all there is to data security. An EDR solution must be able to integrate with other security solutions and platforms for data loss prevention, identity and access management, privileged access management, and so on. Then all of these should be combined under a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution for holistic cyber and data security.
More so, EDR, to be truly effective for data breach detection and response, must be automated. Automation enables faster and more accurate threat detection, analysis, and response across the network, especially considering the explosion of business endpoints in the corporate world. By automating EDR, data security teams can have their work cut in half and focus on priority issues instead of responding to every alert that comes from multiple sources.
Integrating AI and ML technologies into automated endpoint detection and response further enhances the capabilities of not just detecting threats, but being able to predict potential ones before they happen. In fact, this is an important point of distinction between traditional endpoint security and modern EDR. Based on these predictive capabilities, the system can then provide response mechanisms that help prevent the occurrence of threats.
EDR and the Future: Factors and Statistics
By 2030, a report says that the EDR market would have surpassed $15.4 billion dollars. This is not a far-fetched prediction given the rise in remote and hybrid work models, especially when several business activities now take place on the cloud and employees are encouraged to bring their own devices to work.
Other relevant statistics that should cause reflection concerning the roles that EDR is playing and will be playing in data security:
- According to Ericsson, there will be about 5 billion (more than half the world’s population) 5G subscriptions globally by 2028. Access to faster-speed internet is one of the factors accelerating mobile and IoT adoption, and inevitably, the expansion of endpoints.
- The BYOD market is expected to have grown to over $200 billion in the next five years, with an annual growth rate of about 16%.
- In 2023, there are expected to be 7 billion active IoT endpoints globally, up by about 2.5 billion compared to 2022.
- With cloud computing experiencing rapid growth, by 2027, its market will be worth $1.2 trillion.
- According to Forbes, currently, 12.7% of full-time workers have their office at home, while a further 28.2% practice a hybrid work model. And even though 16% of companies are fully remote, it is certain that this work model hasn’t peaked yet since only about 2% of all workers are averse to any form of remote (or hybrid) work.
These reports are not simply about the future though, they are the current reality of organizations today. The attack surface of several organizations has not only increased in size (due to several endpoint devices being plugged into the network) but also in complexity. A BYOD policy, for instance, necessitates the inclusion of un-vetted devices to access corporate data and resources and has contributed to shadow IT troubles.
Conclusion
EDR is a critical tool for data security in today’s world. With the proliferation of endpoint devices and the rise of remote and hybrid work models, the attack surface for organizations has never been larger. And it will only increase as the years go by.
Organizations that invest in EDR can significantly improve their data security posture. However, it is important to remember that EDR is not a silver bullet. It is just one tool in the security arsenal, and it should be used in conjunction with other security solutions such as firewalls, intrusion detection, DLP systems, etc.
