Gone are the days when most business operations were conducted in the office. In today’s digital age, more people are working remotely than ever before. As a result, these virtual workers need devices that allow them to connect to networks and collaborate with their coworkers. However, it’s not enough to provide this hardware—these devices also need to be protected from endpoint security threats.

Why Endpoint Protection Is Important for Remote Work Security

An endpoint refers to any type of device that allows your staff to connect and communicate with your network. For example, laptops, servers, smartphones, and printers are all considered endpoint devices. This type of equipment is a big target for cyber-criminals because it’s vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Through a successful cyber-attack, a hacker can use these devices as entry points to access corporate networks and steal sensitive information.

Best Practices for Endpoint Security

In order to protect your work from home employee error, you need a combination of security solutions. These remote work security solutions can include:

Threat Prevention

Endpoint threat prevention involves technologies like antivirus and next-generation antivirus software (antivirus software that uses AI, behavioral detection, and machine learning). These solutions identify threats and either block or quarantine them, helping your organization greatly reduce the number of threats that can breach your network.

Endpoint Detection and Response

Since threat prevention isn’t perfect, it’s best to have multiple layers of security. If a threat is able to slip past your antivirus and next-generation antivirus software, endpoint detection and response (EDR) can catch it. By monitoring your network with the help of AI-driven security operations and analytics platform, EDR provides actionable recommendations for remediation. Essentially, this is a tool that grants the visibility you need to investigate and mitigate threats.

Server Protection

Although servers exist inside your protected network and you can control access, they’re still susceptible to malware and targeted attacks. In fact, they’re one of the more vulnerable computing devices in your organization because of the high concentration of valuable data they hold. A cyber-criminal who gains access to your network can move laterally between compromised endpoints and your server to bypass protection controls. Server activity needs to be monitored to thwart suspicious activity as soon as it’s detected.

Vulnerability Management

Cybersecurity measures like antivirus software and EDR can go a long way in protecting your employee’s endpoint devices. Just as important, however, is understanding where the weaknesses in your network are. This can be done through the use of vulnerability management. A vulnerability management program can:

• Identify unknown or unprotected assets
• Discover unpatched software
• Prioritize risks based on the threat level
• Suggest remediation tactics with predicted time-frames for resolution

The Benefits of Endpoint Security

As you would expect, implementing remote work security measures can make your endpoints safer to work on. But what other benefits come from this solution?

• Increased Productivity: There are a number of reasons why cyber-attacks are problematic. One of the most costly reasons is that they can keep your staff from accessing the files they need to do their jobs. With endpoint security, files can stay available for your team to access.
• Increased Patch Management: It’s important to keep up with patches as they’re released. Doing so plugs up known security gaps in your software. Endpoint protection provides visibility into your network, allowing your IT department to find unpatched devices.
• Cost Effectiveness: Remote work security is a proactive solution that prevents issues before they impact the end user. Since this is the case, you won’t have to pay for things like manual data retrieval or troubleshooting services.
• Simplify Your Security: Endpoint security is designed to give you full control and visibility of your endpoints, reducing a great deal of administrative and management overhead in the process.

Get Advanced Endpoint Protection From Third Wave Innovations

At Third Wave Innovations, we’re dedicated to the protection of your data. Through our next-generation security operations center as a service, we protect all of your endpoints with our advanced security solutions. We can even tailor our service to fit the specific cybersecurity needs of your business.