Threats to endpoint security need to be taken seriously, and luckily there is a vast range of tools and tactics that modern businesses can call upon to help them in this respect.
As 2022 gets underway, it’s worth taking stock of how endpoint security is handled at the moment and of the trends that will shape it over the coming year, so let’s do just that.
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Consolidation will Empower Endpoint Management
With remote work becoming commonplace, the past couple of years have seen IT teams battling against the significant fragmentation that comes when employees are expected to use personal devices to fulfill their professional responsibilities while away from the office.
Today, the use of Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) is enabling the consolidation of the hardware and systems which remote workers are using.
Solutions that are covered by the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant endpoint protection report can achieve the required unification, enabling diverse ecosystems of devices to be managed and monitored collectively.
Furthermore, this can be applied across a range of operating environments, as it is just the top-level UEM tools that are cohesive. So even in the case of disparate endpoints running different OS software, the centralized control of security is retained, including for updates.
Automation Will Continue to Shape the Industry
A huge amount of intelligent automation is already available within endpoint security, which will only increase in 2022 and beyond.
For example, AI-powered behavioral analytics is able to unpick the strategies used by adversaries and learn from the approaches they use in order to make it easier to defend against them.
Likewise, breaches can be detected and responded to by autonomous solutions, effectively enabling endpoints to become self-healing without needing intervention from human specialists.
Such tech can be embedded at a firmware level, making it innate rather than an added layer included as a second thought. This should address many of the criticisms leveled at IoT devices in particular, which have frequently been pinpointed as the weak link in many IT infrastructures.
Even the persistent threat of ransomware, which spiked to record levels last year, is being reduced thanks to machine learning and automation.
It’s not just about protecting all endpoints equally, but identifying those which are most at risk of exploitation and focusing security efforts accordingly.
Zero Trust Tactics will Eradicate Complacency
The zero trust approach to endpoint security, and cyber security more generally, is rapidly being adopted right now, and for good reason.
Rather than treating every access request that originates internally as being safe because it comes from behind the firewall of the organization, zero trust solutions instead require that every interaction is monitored and validated so that suspicious activity can be spotted immediately.
The good news is that again, according to Gartner’s research, more applications that enable zero trust policies to be rolled out are hitting the market, and most are able to offer excellence in terms of user experience as well as customization.
The Cloud will come into its own
The complexity of endpoints is partly being eroded thanks to the increasing influence of the cloud. This is not a new trend exactly, but it is one which can be studied and explored in all of the other examples covered above.
Only the cloud has made it possible to embrace AI and machine learning tools to tackle security threats, and it can fuel everything from UEM to zero trust solutions.
The cloud itself can be a point of vulnerability, of course, so this may be an area that receives more attention going forward.
