Introduction
As cyber-attacks become more sophisticated, the need for a new approach to network security becomes even more critical. Endpoint security, the first line of defense against malware and attacks, is no longer enough. Today’s threats demand a more comprehensive approach to security, one that delivers protection across all endpoints and cloud environments.
In this blog post, we will explain why endpoint security is not enough and introduce you to the concept of unified protection—a real-time view of everything happening on your network with context for all users, devices applications, and activities. A holistic approach to network protection enables detection and response from cloud to edge in real time.
The Challenges of Endpoint Security
As you may know, endpoint security is not enough. It’s time for enterprises to acknowledge this reality and move beyond it. The truth is that endpoint security can be a reactive approach—it’s not comprehensive, scalable, consistent, or integrated. In fact, endpoint-centric security is often too manual and not repeatable, which makes it difficult to manage the scale of today’s environments. In a world where the majority of data is created, stored, and transmitted outside of the enterprise, endpoints are no longer just laptops and desktops. They include smartphones, tablets, printers, and even connected cars. Tragically, the result for today’s endpoint security products is this. They only protect some of your users’ devices in some parts of their organizations—and they do so with an approach that is reactive rather than proactive or predictive (Default Deny). But this approach is not enough to stop attackers who are targeting every vulnerable point along each user’s journey online—from their machine through the network until they reach their targeted resource such as another employee’s social media account or sensitive internal documents on a cloud-based file sharing service. Learn more here >
Evolving Threats
It’s not just the number of threats that are evolving, but their complexity. You used to be able to detect threats by looking for specific patterns in network traffic or at a particular sequence of events on a machine. Now, however, attackers are getting more sophisticated by using multiple methods simultaneously and targeting the weakest link in your security.
Endpoint security solutions are designed to find and alert you about suspicious activity on client devices so you can respond quickly with actionable intelligence before it causes damage or loss of data. This requires monitoring all processes running on endpoints, so you have visibility into every application accessing sensitive information stored locally on those machines (e.g., credit card numbers).
Why You Should Care About Your Network Visibility
Network visibility is the ability to see all devices on the network and their activity, including those that may be invisible or hidden. This should allow you to understand what is happening at a given time, including which devices are connected and where they are located in your network. You can then use this information to make informed decisions about what needs to be protected and how best to do it. Network visibility tools come in many forms, such as software agents that deploy throughout your environment or monitoring tools for specific protocols like DNS or SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Because what you can’t see can hurt you!
Why Traditional Network Security is no Longer Sufficient
Today’s network security is not enough to protect against the evolving threats of today and tomorrow. Traditional network security is fragmented, uncoordinated, and unable to keep up with the pace of ever-evolving attacks.
The endpoint has become an increasingly important component in gaining entry into a corporate network. Attackers have realized that instead of having to compromise many machines or gain access through multiple layers of defense (like an antivirus product), they can simply target one machine and then use that as a point of entry into your entire network.
Getting Started with Network Security and Unified Protection
When you’re talking about network security, it’s important to consider a layered and unified approach to security. To protect against emerging threats, organizations need to think beyond traditional endpoint security solutions. In order to protect all data, devices, environments, users, and activities it is critical for organizations to have a unified protection strategy that provides visibility across the entire attack surface. The best way to do this is by leveraging machine learning and behavioral analytics on an enterprise scale.
A truly secure network must protect the data regardless of what devices, users, or activities are involved.
The problem with endpoint security is that it is not enough. Endpoint protection is only the first line of defense against threats, and they are one of the weakest links in any organization’s cybersecurity defenses.
The growing number of devices means more endpoints need to be protected: laptops, desktops, mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), IoT devices like thermostats, and baby monitors—even industrial control systems (ICS) if not properly secured, can be vulnerable to attack.
The growing number of threats means more advanced protection is needed: cybercriminals will continue to develop new malware variants designed to bypass traditional antivirus software or cloud-based anti-malware services. The ability for attackers to run machine learning algorithms against the system allows them to build new strains of malware that can evade detection by most traditional AV solutions.
Conclusion
To understand why traditional network security is failing, we need to look at the larger changes happening across enterprise networks today. As the digital and physical worlds continue to converge in new ways, organizations of all sizes are becoming more connected than ever before. As a result, the number of devices connected to corporate networks has increased dramatically as workers bring their own smartphones and tablets into the workplace. This can create significant challenges for IT teams that are still using outdated tools designed with a relatively small number of laptops or desktops in mind. Traditional endpoint security solutions cannot see all these devices, meaning data breaches occur without detection. Then it is too late.