In today’s digital world, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and flexible work-from-home (WFH) options are no longer an added benefit. Instead, they are an expectation across nearly every industry.
As an increasing number of employees login from home, endpoint security has become a major pain point for IT managers at organizations of all sizes. Every personal smartphone, tablet and laptop accessing a company’s network as well as any confidential data represents a potential threat.
Endpoints are a prime target for hackers and cybercriminals due to their inconsistent and often inadequate security configurations — IDC found that 70% of successful enterprise network breaches first originate on endpoint devices. A threat can become difficult — if not impossible — to manage if endpoints aren’t controlled and appropriately secured with proactive security measures.
By deploying an endpoint management solution, your organization can meet the evolving challenges of today’s digital working world, minimizing your risk of an attack while still capturing the benefits of offering WFH and BYOD policies.
How has remote work changed endpoint management?
As Security Magazine explains, IT managers have long been stretched thin in their efforts to manually maintain global endpoint security settings, configurations and patching. Now that so many organization’s employees are connecting remotely, the job has become even more difficult.
Traditionally, endpoint management was simply the process that an organization followed to monitor, troubleshoot and update endpoint devices.
Security Boulevard explains that IT teams were primarily responsible for managing endpoints that were on-location, including servers, desktops, laptops and printers. Having physical access to these devices helped to promote visibility and reduce the potential for a security gap to go unnoticed. That job has since expanded to also monitoring and maintaining virtual machines, mobile devices, cloud infrastructure systems, personal networks and IoT-enabled devices.
As employees continue to access confidential information and protected data on these unsecure networks and devices, CISO Magazine explains that organizations must find a way to address four key emerging challenges through their endpoint security protocol:
- Unsecured wireless access points: As public workspaces begin to reopen, IT teams risk workers using unmanaged endpoint devices to access corporate systems on public Wi-Fi, which lacks data encryption or any other security measures.
- Data breaches: Remote employees can also put sensitive corporate data at risk by uploading it on a public cloud platform or their own unsecured home network.
- IoT devices: As an increasing percentage of devices become IoT-enabled, any of these endpoints can become potential targets if they are used outside of standard IT security perimeters.
- Malware and phishing: A study by Cybersecurity Insiders revealed that COVID-19 served as a catalyst for an increase in network threats across industries as more employees are remotely accessing sensitive data from their personal devices.
For even the most experienced IT teams, the combination of these challenges makes it impossible to effectively manage and maintain a secure digital network, especially as the number of endpoints used to access enterprise data is only expected to grow. Gartner estimated that at least 5.8 billion endpoints were used for daily business operations by the end of 2020, a number that is likely to skyrocket as the capabilities of technology and the needs of employees evolve.
Endpoint management solutions offer the answer to maintaining security without sacrificing the flexibility of WFH. The technology helps IT teams to monitor, manage and secure all their endpoint devices from a single platform, minimizing the time-consuming and manual nature of many of the administrative tasks associated with endpoint management.
Finding the right endpoint management solution for your organization
The most effective security protocol and endpoint solution will help provide IT managers with fuller visibility into the status of applications, data points and connections. However, dedicating the time and resources to creating the infrastructure internally can pose a significant strain on already overstretched teams.
At Faronics, we offer an all-encompassing endpoint management solution to address your organization’s evolving security needs.
Our Deploy application provides IT managers with the endpoint visibility and control they need to support a remote workforce. With one click setup and implementation, companies can easily add new endpoints to their networks with the ability to easily monitor and manage user activity. Through this cloud-based platform, your organization can maintain complete control over Windows OS updates, application patches and more.
Across every industry, business leaders and IT managers face increasingly complex endpoint challenges. By deploying a scalable and user-friendly endpoint management solution, your team can meet these challenges, avoiding costly downtimes while still enjoying the benefits of flexible work policies.
To learn more, explore our products online or sign up for a free trial today.
