Automation and Simplicity Through EDR
We’re in a solution-saturated market. Everywhere you look there are more tools that do more things and ingest more data and give you more – and more, and more. Now it’s a challenge to see just how much of that “more” you really need, and what to do with the data you’ve been given. The answer is to automate – get rid of any extra cycles you don’t need and can’t afford in your workload. Let technology do what it does best. That will allow you to simplify Big Data and big problems into something more manageable, and let you stay ahead of your security in 2023.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) makes a world of difference when it comes to security of any level – enterprise or SMB – because it strategically hits where defense is needed the most; the endpoint. Endpoints are the gateways through which malicious exploits get through – email servers, remote work devices, virtual machines, and IoT devices to name a few. According to intelligence firm IDC, 70% of breaches originate at the endpoint. Starting here gives you the most bang for your buck – doing away with 7 out of 10 breach-related incidents with one solution is a great start to a simplified strategy and gives your security teams more time for whatever’s left.
How EDR Automates and Simplifies
The best way to showcase the benefits of EDR is a side-by-side scenario comparison. Other solutions exist, like Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) or Next Generation Firewalls (NGAV), that go part way but don’t provide the full lift. Here’s what your workload would look like with one of those, or something similar:
Your EPP, NGAV, or SIEM solution delivers thousands of alerts for your SOC to analyze. Your team goes through them by hand, manually investigating and manually remediating threats. Statistically speaking, they’ll spend nearly a quarter of their time on email security alone (which EDR could have automated). They’ll allocate an average of 30 minutes on each actionable alert, and spend 32 chasing down each false positive, per IDC. One recent report noted that 38% of respondents receive over 1,000 alerts per day – and one fifth of them are bogus. It doesn’t take too much addition to realize the math doesn’t add up.
That’s the reality for many organizations going into 2023. All the tools are set up to catch “all the fish” and there’s not enough time, staff, or resources to sort them.
In comes EDR. This is what an enterprise with Endpoint Detection and Response looks like in the face of similar odds. An average of one to several thousand alerts per day come flowing in from across your endpoints. We want more data. Automated, NGAV based extended detection autonomously investigates threats, weeds out false positives, and analyzes digital forensics. The vast majority of these attacks are blocked autonomously by EDR. The rest, packaged up and presented with contextual clues and deep threat information, are presented to your team for a brief review and decision – was that one of your team installing a new app? Or was it an attacker? Containment, investigation, and remediation tools are all at your team’s fingertips for rapid, guided response, saving your team the busy work – and remediating malicious scenarios that could lead to data loss and breaches.
This force multiplies your team – be it 10 or 100 – to be able to take on the mind work of strategizing the next steps and proactively building your organization’s defenses. The only jobs this takes away are the ones not being done anyway – the things that get triaged and left behind due to alert fatigue, and that subsequently allow threats to slip through, resulting in attacks.
VIPRE Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) – offers the advanced performance of a cloud-based system, simplified for ease of use.
The VIPRE EDR Story
We came to the conclusion that something more streamlined and smarter needed to appear in the endpoint protection market when we came across the following problems. We saw customers with NGAV automation already set up; minimal configuration, minimal administration. However, it wasn’t enough. Increasingly, and as threats ramped up, they wanted additional details – what were the threat actions, what was the root cause?
We surveyed the industry and found an abundance of unnecessary and complex tools, and many solutions that just weren’t tackling the basics very well.
That’s when we decided to extend our EDR solution a step further. By building on top of existing NGAV, we extended detection types, forensic event collection and analysis, and further automated mitigation and remediation. Now, our EDR solution was more than a glorified EPP – it could really knock down the work SOCs were expected to do on a daily basis and help them make headway through all the security noise.
Future-proof protection with EDR
EDR is the last line of defense in a defense-in-depth approach. Not only does it make the behemoth task of sorting and sifting alerts more manageable, but it provides a completing piece to strategies that already employ email security and NGAV solutions – and it extends our top-ranking protection to the Cloud. Many of today’s threats evolve quickly and can bypass traditional defenses that look for signatures alone. Today’s complex exploits require endpoint detection that can spot the components of an attack while it is in progress and identify it for what it is. Then, it needs to be able to automatically neutralize those attacks, freeing up teams and resources for the next round.
VIPRE EDR will future-proof your security system against tomorrow’s threats by providing the following extended benefits:
- File quarantine, process termination, network isolation
- Root cause analysis, endpoint events, remote shell
- Guidance for IT admins to find the information they need
- Detailed forensic analysis of potential threats, with behavioral determination of malicious intent
And VIPRE EDR will simplify endpoint security in the following autonomous ways:
- Removing files, killing processes
- IoC identification to send upstream
- Patching vulnerable apps
- Providing mobile accessibility to the EDR dashboard
To combat the threats that organizations will encounter this year, security teams need to think smarter and more strategically. Look at the underground as-a-Service economy (Ransomware-as-a-Service, Phishing-aaS, Hacking-aaS, Malware-aaS) and you’ll see black hats are not afraid to leverage technology to achieve their nefarious purposes. Security practitioners need to fight fire with fire and leverage the next-generation capabilities of Endpoint Detection and Response in order to level the playing field.