Adopting an endpoint strategy is crucial in strengthening your overall security posture but not many organizations are taking a holistic approach to securing their endpoints. According to research by IDC, nearly 50 per cent of organizations treat endpoint security as a secondary issue. Your infrastructure is comprised of thousands of endpoints that are susceptible to threats like malware and performance degradation. One damaged endpoint can cause significant damage to your organization such as financial loss or downtime, which is why it’s important to protect your endpoints. Here are three ways you can improve endpoint security.

Source: IDC

Reevaluate your endpoints

The first part of your endpoint strategy is to determine what endpoints reside in your infrastructure. This can be challenging because many organizations allow employees to bring their own devices to work and IoT devices like smart watches and personal mobile phones are difficult to regulate. What organizations can control and secure are the devices that they issue and use in the office.

Your endpoint strategy should consist of protecting all endpoints in your organization. This includes endpoints like printers and tablets, which are not often thought of as high risk despite the fact they can also be targeted by hackers or used as an entry point to laterally move around the organization. Failing to secure these devices causes gaps in endpoint protection. Organizations should seek to secure all endpoints with the same level of security policies. Organizations should also pay special attention when implementing IoT devices because they don’t always come with built-in security.

Gain visibility

In order to properly secure and manage endpoints, organizations need visibility. Organizations need to be able to see if an endpoint is running out of date software or needs to be patched for vulnerabilities. Without visibility, organizations leave their endpoints vulnerable.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult for organizations to keep track of their endpoints. This can be problematic because each endpoint is a potential entry point for hackers.  Using a single management console will make it easier to not only manage endpoints but gain insights and visibility into them as well. Under a single-pane-of-glass console, organizations can easily view all the policies, alerts and data from their endpoints.

Layer protection

Once proper visibility is established, it’s easier for organizations to implement the necessary controls to protect the endpoints. When it comes to complete endpoint security, taking a layered approach will help ensure your endpoints are protected at every level. This means your endpoint strategy should go beyond just having antivirus and a firewall. Your endpoint solution should include protection at all levels such as leveraging machine learning to detect emerging threats and web controls that inspect URLs.

Instead of having to install multiple products, our endpoint solution Secure IT – Endpoint product includes various modules that can be layered for multiple layers of protection. Features such as threat prevention, sandboxing and application containment are all included in our endpoint solution, with other add-ons available.