Accelerate towards Zero Trust, SASE, and XDR with help from Cisco Secure Endpoint

Accelerate towards Zero Trust, SASE, and XDR with help from Cisco Secure Endpoint Prior to 2020, on-location employees significantly outnumbered remote ones. Historically, it made more sense to focus on the strength of on-premises...Contents

Forced change or sudden opportunity?

Prior to 2020, on-location employees significantly outnumbered remote ones. Historically, it made more sense to focus on the strength of on-premises control points like the firewall, web, and email while increasing network visibility.

Well as we all know, March 2020 pretty much inverted that reality overnight. Rather than focusing on planned longer-term security initiatives, most security teams found themselves scrambling to simply restore a measure of control to maintain business continuity, enable secure remote work and protect against new or more advanced cyberthreats. Now more than ever before, Endpoint Security is a critical security control point, and is in security agendas for a handful of reasons.

176% increase in the number of Collaboration Apps installed¹

50% increase in the number of endpoint devices being used for more than 8 hours a day²

1,2: https://www.itprotoday.com/endpoint-protection/surge-endpoint-attacks-calls-changes-endpoint-protection

First, the attack surface just exploded in the last year. Companies have more devices, accessing more information, on more applications, from more locations, from outside the firewall than they ever have before.

Second, the number of threats targeting endpoints has spiked. Ransomware attacks alone increased 109% during 2021, and that is on top of the phishing attacks and stolen credential hacking, which make up about 40% of attacks².

Third, the sophistication of endpoint attacks has increased. We’re seeing increasingly complex, low-and-slow attacks that leverage multiple attack vectors to evade detection from the various control points by staying under detection radars.

Fourth, the hybrid work environment is definitely the new normal. The shift to hybrid workforce was an inevitability, the pandemic simply accelerated it. Technology has long made it possible to work from…anywhere. Companies have always had their share of remote workers, but they have always kept the bulk of the work population in the office and behind the firewall. Now that the paradigm has expanded, there will definitely be more who will be working from home as the “We can run our company with our people in the office or from home” line is now proven to work. It is now on every security team to figure out how to accommodate this model and tackle some newly exacerbated challenges.

The turmoil of the last year has probably felt like a brick through a window.

Despite this, now is a phenomenal chance for savvy security teams to set themselves up for a more secure operating paradigm and move towards transformative goals.

Of the companies surveyed in Cisco’s 2020 “Future of Secure Remote Work report, 96% reported changes in their cyber security policies to support remote work in 2020 and 48% reported they felt only somewhat prepared”¹

https://weworkremotely.com/remote-work-in-2019-what-the-trends-insights-and-predictions-say

“Cisco Secure Endpoint does a very good job at detecting and preventing threats and other forms of cyber attacks. It has made my job easier by allowing me to pinpoint which systems have been attacked and what file systems are affected.”

Adrimar Maspara,IT Systems Analyst,
ServiceTec Aport Serv

Endpoint security is a means to an end, not just an end in and of itself.

Endpoint Security combines the preventative protection of an Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) solution with the robust detection, investigation and response capabilities of an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution. Using cloud-based analytics it leaves valuable CPU resources to users, so they are able to focus on getting their work done while the business is protected. Having been designed to quickly detect, analyze, block, and remediate attacks, Endpoint Security is ideally suited to handle the types of pressures that a hybrid workforce will place on any environment as a stand-alone security control point.

This is valuable enough to any organization; however, the deeper, more encompassing value of Endpoint Security is how it contributes to an integrated security paradigm. Endpoint Security has total visibility on the endpoint–direct knowledge of user behavior, clear understanding of file movement, and specific and deeper insight into the security posture of the endpoint itself. When this context is made available and actionable to the other control points, security efficacy increases, and threat response gets carried out faster.

As part of the Cisco Secure portfolio and the SecureX platform, Cisco Secure Endpoint (Formerly AMP for Endpoints) delivers three key elements that security teams need now, more than ever.

First, it unifies user and endpoint protection, so workers are verified and secured, wherever they are.

Second, it delivers a deeper view of each endpoint and context for every event involving the device.

Third, it enables strategic integration to help automate endpoint security related tasks across operation teams.

It is these benefits that enable Cisco Secure Endpoint to deliver critical elements of the current three security megatrends: Zero Trust, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and Extended Detection and Response (XDR). Read on to learn about each of these trends and how you can leverage Cisco Secure Endpoint in your environment to secure remote workers and move towards major security goals.

We are relentless in our commitment to simplifying security

Our security platform, SecureX, enables higher level of automation, accelerated detection and remediation across cloud and on-premises.

The Cisco Secure Client combines user and endpoint protection into a single, cloud-based agent that secures user access, protects endpoints, defends the cloud, and delivers robust identity verification. A single agent for your remote worker needs.

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