The number of cyberattacks leveled against businesses and average people is rising every year. The Identity Theft Resource Center found that data breaches increased 40 percent over the last year. Remaining vigilant about the ever-present danger of a hack is simply a part of life these days, but that doesn’t mean the struggle is hopeless. Enterprises are using new approaches by combining technology with clever planning, to improve business continuity. Enabling self-healing endpoints is one concept that is being increasingly adopted by organizations.
What Does “Self-Healing” Mean?
High system availability has become a necessity for organizations, as many critical fast-paced business functions are dependent on some critical endpoints. Maintaining consistent system configurations with diverse setups, across thousands of endpoints can become a nightmare for IT admins, given the amount time and manual labour involved. By enabling self-healing endpoints, IT admins can ensure preferred system configurations are untampered and always available. The problem of having to check and fix every single endpoint’s control settings is eliminated with this concept.
The idea behind self-healing is to setup resilient endpoints which can revert back to a known state – i.e with approved licensed software with security protocols – instantly, with automation or minimal manual involvement. With APTs, a breach can go dormant/ undetected for long. Self-healing endpoints can avoid the problem of configuration drift, where systems end up with modified configuration, due to unrecorded, unwanted, accumulated changes which modify the setup, and potentially hamper business operations.
How can organizations enhance operational continuity in the face of an unforeseen incident, given this ever-growing cybersecurity epidemic? Endpoints are plagued with undetected programs such as ransomware, trojans, keyloggers and all other kinds of malware. With automated maintenance schedules set up incorporating Reboot to Restore solutions, IT admins can ensure known/ unknown installations are wiped off, and revert the system back to a safer state without interrupting uptime.
IT Teams Are Constantly Over-burdened
Many IT problems demand the attention of a dedicated employee. While a human has much more flexibility than an automated system in terms of solutions to a problem, people aren’t very good at quickly addressing an issue. In fact, it can take months for a company to even realize an attack has happened.
According to the Ponemon Institute, it takes financial organizations an average of 98 days to discover a breach. What’s more, retailers took a while to figure out that they’ve been hit. In that time, a hacker can do an enormous amount of damage, both to the company’s financials and to its public image.
A major contributor to this reduced response time is the fact that IT departments simply don’t have the resources to properly fight back against cybercriminals. A study from Forrester Consulting found that roughly 63 percent of companies have an understaffed IT department. While this has far-reaching implications in a number of areas, perhaps the biggest repercussion is how it affects an enterprise’s ability to stave off cyberattacks.
Self-healing Endpoints Can Speed Up Response Time
An organization has to defend against a multitude of APTs. Hackers only have to find a single vulnerability. What’s more, IT departments have a host of problems on their plate outside of security. Therefore, companies need automated mechanisms to bolster their ability to fight back, and self-healing endpoints are a perfect example of what smartly implemented solutions can really do.
IT departments don’t need to waste precious resources, resolving security problems, and manually restoring systems. In this way, administrators can rest assured that their companies are as protected as they possibly can be without having to move IT workers away from critical projects.
Automated Endpoint Maintenance is The Way Forward
The other implication of an understaffed IT department has to do with the opportunity cost of fixing mundane security issues manually. When a person uses their time and energy to reconfigure a machine, they’re skipping out on important duties such as general maintenance, infrastructure enhancements and inventory management. By automating self-healing endpoints, IT workers have more time to spend on projects that can actually improve an organization’s operations.
Software licensing and compliance monitoring get majorly affected by unapproved installations. These can have major legal and financial ramifications. Ensuring the security and health of your endpoints is absolutely crucial, and with limited resources, IT teams struggle with endpoint maintenance, management and security. Add to that, the burden of tackling real-time helpdesk tickets. As a result business continuity gets majorly affected. By automating endpoint maintenance schedules, IT teams can move past mundane maintenance tasks, and ensure a consistent endpoint experience with high availability.
To learn how Faronics makes self-healing endpoints a possibility, contact us today.
