When successful, attacks often impact more than one endpoint. IT professionals surveyed by the SANS Institute in 2018 said 84 percent of their endpoint breaches over the previous year involved multiple endpoints.
It makes sense, then, that security software spending in 2018 — $34.4 billion worldwide — was higher for endpoint security than any other segment, according to IDC. That trend, IDC predicts, will continue through the 2022 forecast period.
“Organizations have to manage endpoint security across hybrid, multicloud environments,” says Robert Westervelt, a research director in IDC’s security products group. “That’s a huge challenge right now, because they’re trying to extend solutions designed and configured for the traditional IT environment.”
Security as a Service Cuts Out Wasted Time
Some IT leaders discover the value of security integration after difficult experiences. Take Joe Mrazik, network administrator at Kaas Tailored, a Mukilteo, Wash.-based provider of furnishings for the aerospace, retail and hospitality industries.
Mrazik became a Security as a Service convert in the wake of a “horror story” breach that started with a Windows workstation.
The workstation’s system time had changed, an action that requires administrator privileges. Mrazik took the machine offline and started investigating. He found event logs filling up with strange login attempts and signs of administrative account takeovers.
Though Kaas’s anti-virus vendor at the time provided reports, Mrazik and his small IT team were forced to manually filter them.
“We’d spend hours sifting reports and logs, but by the time we got a lead, everything had changed,” he says. Meanwhile, the malicious code spread, eventually reaching their domain controllers.
“We’d think we’d cleaned it up, and the next day it would be somewhere else,” says Mrazik. They worked around the clock for a week before stabilizing the environment, but never found any malware file.
MORE FROM BIZTECH: Learn more about how to find and keep top cybersecurity talent.
Use the Cloud to Get Updates in Real-Time
After calculating the costs of that slog, and tired of pushing out anti-virus updates that were already stale because they didn’t cover just-released threats, Mrazik decided to explore alternatives. After seeing a demonstration of Carbon Black’s CB Defense, he was sold.
The cloud-based product bundles together EDR and next-generation anti-virus, as well as predictive analytics and response and remediation tools.