The term “next-generation” is used frequently across the tech industry, making it easy to gloss over it without giving much thought. When it comes to cybersecurity, your company can’t afford to make mistakes by falling for labels.
Endpoint security has become increasingly important as more companies are geographically distributed with many remote workers and connected devices. Next-generation endpoint security implies that the product you’re purchasing today is more powerful than previous versions for protecting devices at the edge of the network. When no industry standard exists for what is required to call a security product “next-generation”, how do you know what you’re getting?
To ensure that you are working with the ideal endpoint security solution, it’s important to understand why a new generation of tools is needed, and what makes these tools better than the “last generation.” If you purchase an endpoint security tool just because it’s labeled as “next-generation,” you can be left with inadequate defenses that make you prone to cyberattacks.
Getting into the details of what next-generation endpoint security delivers demystifies the term, emphasizes the value of next-generation for endpoint security, and shows how it has been strengthened to defend against evolving cyber threats.
Why We Need the Next Generation of
Endpoint Security
We need a new generation of security tools because we’re dealing with increasingly sophisticated and ever-changing threats. Bad actors are highly motivated to get their malware into your network and onto your endpoints. Many malware groups are highly organized criminal organizations that operate as full-blown software development shops with some teams dedicated to building malware and other teams dedicated to testing it against the security solutions you use to protect your environment.
Today’s cybercriminals are using fileless malware, ransomware, cryptomining, and a variety of other cutting-edge approaches to be successful. As a result, you’re not fully protected unless you have tools that can identify and stop less common or newly discovered threat types. That’s where next-generation endpoint security tools come in.
Typically, the term “next-generation” is used to describe two different security products: next-generation endpoint security and next-generation antivirus. Although they sound similar, these products offer different functionality.
Next-Generation Anti-Virus (NGAV)
Next-generation antivirus (NGAV) goes beyond its previous generation of point-in-time antivirus tools to continuously monitor files on the endpoint, whether they are malicious or not. This approach is useful when a file that initially appeared clean starts to exhibit malicious behavior after entering your environment.
Antivirus solutions used to be limited by a lack of remediation capabilities needed when a breach is detected. However, today’s next-generation anti-virus solutions deliver automated responses.
NGAV is the core prevention engine within Next-Generation Endpoint Security (NGES). NGAV moves beyond traditional signature-based detection to leverage AI, Machine Learning (ML), and behavioral analysis to stop known and unknown threats, such as ransomware, zero-day exploits, and fileless attacks, in real-time. These capabilities are often carried out using a lightweight cloud-based agent for fast, low-impact protection and automated response. A signature-based approach no longer works for threat detection because cyberattacks have become more dynamic, changing over time.
Next Generation Endpoint Security (NGES) expands on NGAV by integrating more features, such as Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR), offering deeper visibility, investigation, and response capabilities for complex threats and creating a unified security posture.
Next-generation endpoint security tools typically come packed with continuous monitoring capabilities like those found in a next-generation antivirus but tend to offer far more robust investigation and remediation capabilities.
With the rapidly evolving and frequently changing threat landscape, protection needs to be quickly and frequently updated with the latest threat intelligence. By taking a cloud-based approach to endpoint security, next-generation tools have constant and instant access to the latest threat intelligence without requiring manual updates. The cloud enables companies to leverage vast external data feeds for faster, more accurate threat identification.
Cloud-based management allows next-generation endpoint security to protect modern devices from sophisticated threats that traditional endpoint security misses by offering centralized control, real-time visibility, and automated responses for anywhere/anytime security.
To determine if your company is working with an endpoint security solution that qualifies as next-generation, look for the following 10 capabilities.
1. Flexible Deployment Options
Next-generation endpoint security solutions should make your life easier from your very first interaction with them. They should adapt to your current environment and needs, offering cloud or on-premises deployment options, scalability, and protection for every endpoint in your organization, whether it’s a PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, or Android device.
2. Layered Prevention
With the variety and number of threats attempting to enter your environment, multiple preventative engines are necessary. When attackers identify a weakness, they easily evade tools with limited threat prevention techniques. Next-generation tools should constantly evolve to protect you against new threat types, such as fileless malware and self-propagating ransomware.
3. Rapid Time to Detection
Detecting threats as early as possible is crucial. When a threat is allowed to lurk in your environment for a long time, it can move laterally across the system, inflicting more damage as it goes.
4. Continuous Monitoring
No preventative method can stop every attack on your endpoints. Because attack vectors and evasion techniques will always advance and evolve, having continuous visibility into what happens within your environment after a file has been granted access is vital.
5. Cross-Environment Integrations
Implementing multiple point products for security in your environment costs you more time and money without increasing the effectiveness of your endpoint security. Endpoint security tools should be able to communicate with the other security tools across your environment through an integrated architecture that enables the sharing and ingesting of threat intelligence to learn from each other over time.
6. Prevention, Detection, and Response Capabilities
Prevention and detection capabilities have always been a given in endpoint security. However, if your endpoint security solution doesn’t allow you to investigate and remediate within the same lightweight connector, you’re being robbed of time, money, and security effectiveness. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Provides continuous monitoring, visibility, and forensic tools to investigate and mitigate advanced threats.
7. Behavioral Analysis
Detecting malicious activities by monitoring user and application actions stops suspicious processes before they can cause damage to endpoints and the information they handle.
8. AI and Machine Learning
Next-Generation endpoint security solutions must be able to analyze patterns to identify unknown and emerging threats, not just known malware signatures.
9. Automated Remediation and Rollback
The solution should use automation to isolate threats and restore compromised systems to a previous safe state after attacks such as ransomware.
10. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)
Endpoint security should enforce strict access controls, verifying every user and device.
Finding an endpoint security solution that promises to be better than the products that came before is great. However, don’t take these solutions at their word. Identify what you need in endpoint security and don’t settle for anything less.
Partnering with Xceptional will give you peace of mind that you are working with an endpoint security solution that has all the capabilities needed in today’s threat landscape. We offer next generation endpoint security as part of our Cybersecurity and Compliance Services.
Additionally, as a Cisco Partner, we also have the certified expertise needed to develop a cutting-edge endpoint security solution using leading technologies, such as:
Xceptional is well equipped to help you assess, deploy, and optimize Cisco’s security solutions. Reach out to learn more.
Adopt next-generation endpoint security with confidence. Reach out to Xceptional today to get started.