Threats are becoming more sophisticated and breaches increasingly common, causing anxiety within organizations. This fear amplifies a pervasive willingness to purchase more endpoint protection solutions. Endpoint security spend is greater than ever. And yet, the endpoint is “patient zero” in the vast majority of recent breaches, proving that simply spending more on security tools isn’t enough. While the answer may be decreasing complexity on the endpoint, many of those services are needed.
In addition, the number of combinations of security controls from a variety of vendors makes it impossible to test pre-deployment by enterprises. Endpoints still require patches, encryption and other protections, and those controls must be resilient themselves. This resilience can only be made possible through persistence—that is, maintaining a constant, unbreakable connection to data and devices that identifies and remediates security issues as they arise through consultation services.
Encryption is the staple security tool most often taken for granted. While it can certainly provide protection, it is not a “set it and forget it” solution—quite the contrary. Whether disabled by users or through malfunction, encryption is regularly broken, disabled, misconfigured, or missing entirely. In fact, at any given point in time, over 42 percent of endpoints experienced encryption failures. However, the near half-time spent unencrypted is only part of the story. The study found that data protections are voided when chronically fragile encryption agents fail. What’s more, encryption failures occur reliably and predictably—two percent of encryption agents failed every week. While half of all encryption failures occurred within two weeks, the rate of decay is constant: eight percent failure per 30 days. In addition to the failure rates, patch and client management agents are often repeat offenders. Of those patching agents requiring repair, 75 percent reported at least two repair events and 50 percent reported three or more repair events. Additionally, five percent could be considered to be chronically ill, with 80 or more repair events in the same one-month period.
The critical endpoint security solurtions we rely on are flawed. They are extremely fragile, degrade quickly, and create unnecessary friction for users. The study found an average of 10 distinct agents layered onto most of the devices. With this number, it’s inevitable that agents will collide, be disabled by users, or go unpatched. These blind spots hinder the visibility of IT and security leaders and leave endpoints—and the organizations to which they belong—increasingly vulnerable over time. The real problem organizations face is in ensuring that these controls remain in place and are functioning at all times.
It is pointless to invest more money into exciting new technologies (such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning) if the basic measures—visibility, control, and resilience—are not operating effectively first. And thus, to help business providers select the best, most promising endpoint security consulting/services, Enterprise Security Magazine, in conjunction with a distinguished panel of prominent marketing specialists and analysts, and our very own editorial board, have assessed and shortlisted companies who offer comprehensive and seamless consulting/services in the endpoint security industry. This listing gives a comprehensive understanding of consulting/services that can be implemented to optimize your business process.
We present to you, our “Top 10 Endpoint Security Consulting/Services Companies - 2019.”
