Endpoints – meaning PCs, servers and other devices that connect over a network – are the fundamental building blocks of modern IT infrastructure. By extension, endpoint security is a fundamental practice for securing IT environments.
That’s why managed service providers (MSPs) and businesses must master the ins and outs of endpoint security. Keep reading for guidance as we discuss the essentials of how endpoint security works, why it’s important and how organizations can develop and implement effective endpoint security practices.
Endpoint Security Overview
Endpoint security is the practice of protecting PCs, servers, mobile devices and other network-connected hosts against cyberattacks. It’s a holistic process that includes the various tools and procedures necessary to identify and mitigate security threats that may impact endpoints.
What’s an Endpoint, Exactly?
The term endpoint refers to any device that connects to a network. Endpoints include physical devices, like computers, servers, mobile phones and printers. They may also include software-defined resources such as virtual machines.
By some definitions, other types of IT assets, like network-connected databases or file shares, are also considered endpoints. Even SaaS applications sometimes fall within the purview of what a business defines as its endpoints, since they are resources that users access over the network.
Why Is Endpoint Security Important?
The most obvious reason why endpoint security is important is that endpoints are among the primary resources that threat actors often target. If attackers can identify software vulnerabilities or misconfigurations within the operating system, applications or user settings present on an endpoint, they can potentially exploit them to gain control of the device. From there, they may be able to escalate the attack to impact other endpoints.
Thus, securing endpoints is one of the most vital steps toward establishing an effective overall security posture.
The Growing Importance of Endpoint Security
Endpoint security has been important for decades, stretching back to the days of the earliest network-connected devices. However, securing endpoints has become increasingly important in recent years due to newfound trends, such as:
- Remote work: The number of employees working remotely has increased by more than 50 percent since 2020. From a security perspective, this trend contributes to new risk because it means that more workers depend on endpoints that are not fully protected by traditional enterprise security controls, like on-prem firewalls.
- Increase in attacks: Cyberattacks have surged in frequency, due partly to the ease with which threat actors can launch attacks using AI tools. To cite just one data point, Amazon reported in 2024 that the number of threats it detected each day jumped from 100 million to 750 million in a half-year period. More attacks mean more potential endpoint breaches.
- Increase in endpoints: The sheer number of endpoints associated with the typical business has increased, too. In a world where a single employee may use multiple PCs, laptops and mobile phones for work purposes, threat actors have more endpoints than ever to target. Network-connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices further add to the total number of endpoints on the typical network.
For these reasons, it has never been more important than at present to develop effective endpoint security strategies.
Types of Endpoint Security Solutions
Various types of endpoint security tools are available to help MSPs, as well as organizations in general, secure endpoints. Key types of solutions include:
- Antivirus: Antivirus software, which scans local devices for malware, is among the most basic types of endpoint protection solutions. It’s effective at detecting basic infections but may miss sophisticated threats.
- EDR: Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) software monitors endpoints and networks for suspicious activity and attempts to contain active threats.
- XDR: Extended Detection and Response (XDR) tools are an enhanced version of EDR solutions. XDR typically offers more advanced risk detection techniques, and it may integrate more seamlessly with other cybersecurity solutions.
- MDM: Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms help organizations track the mobile devices connected to their network.
- SASE: Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a type of software that monitors network connections and enforces security policies. Although SASE doesn’t focus exclusively on endpoint security, it can help protect endpoints by controlling how they interact with the network.
Although the functionality and capabilities of these solutions overlap, each type of offering addresses a different aspect of endpoint security. For this reason, it’s often necessary to deploy multiple endpoint security tools.
Why Endpoint Security Can Be Tough
While endpoint security is critical, it can also be challenging. MSPs and businesses face unique difficulties when securing the endpoints under their control.
Endpoint Security Challenges for MSPs
For MSPs, key endpoint security challenges include:
- Diverse needs: An MSP may manage endpoints for multiple customers, each with bespoke types of endpoints and security requirements.
- Limited access: MSPs may not have full access to clients’ endpoints, which limits their ability to install endpoint protection solutions.
- Limited resources: The staffing resources of MSPs are also limited, and the more time technicians spend managing endpoint security manually, the more of a hit MSPS tend to take to profitability.
Endpoint Security Challenges for Businesses
Businesses that manage their own endpoints rather than working with MSPs also face special challenges when it comes to endpoint security:
- BYOD policies: More than 80 percent of organizations maintain Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, which give employees the option of using personal devices for work. Because businesses don’t own or directly control such devices, their ability to secure them may be limited.
Further reading Mitigating BYOD Problems: Key Steps to Solve
- Off-site work: As noted above, many employees now work remotely. When they do so, they connect using local networks that the business can’t directly monitor or protect.
- Diverse endpoints: The typical business may need to secure many types of endpoints, each with different operating systems, user account settings, hardware profiles and so on. This makes it challenging to apply a one-size-fits-all policy to endpoint security.
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Best Practices for Optimizing Endpoint Security
Despite these challenges, MSPs and businesses can take steps to protect the endpoints under their supervision – as they must if they want to adopt a proactive approach to security. Here’s a look at key endpoint security best practices.
Regular Updates and Patch Management
Keeping the software on endpoints up-to-date is essential, since outdated software may be subject to vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit. To this end, it’s crucial to patch software regularly. Ideally, teams will use automated patching tools that update software quickly and consistently.
MFA
Requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) on devices can bolster endpoint security by providing additional layers of security. Although MFA can be circumvented in some cases and is not bullet-proof, it adds layers of protection, mitigating the risk that attackers who manage to steal a username and password will gain unfettered access to an endpoint.
Least-Privilege Access
Along similar lines, configuring endpoints with least-privilege access policies – meaning that each user account and software resource receives the lowest level of permissions necessary to achieve required use cases – helps reduce the risk of endpoint breaches by restricting the actions that a compromised account can carry out.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuously monitoring endpoints, as well as the networks they connect to, can clue organizations into suspicious activity, such as unusual connections to unknown hosts. Admins can then take action by isolating affected endpoints so that if they are compromised, the attack won’t spread.
Zero Trust
Zero trust is the practice of never trusting an unknown endpoint or other resource by default. As part of an endpoint security strategy, zero trust helps ensure that compromised endpoints – such as a hacked personal device that an employee joins to the network without understand the risk – don’t become points of entry for attacks against the corporate IT estate.
Further reading How Zero Trust Can Help MSPs Reduce Security Threats
Incident Response Planning
When endpoint security incidents arise, it’s critical to respond quickly, before the threat spreads. Having an incident response plan in place helps teams to do this. The plan should spell out which actions the organization will take to isolate compromised endpoints and remediate breaches on them.
Regular Backups
Establishing effective backup policies and performing regular backups of endpoints helps mitigate endpoint security risks by ensuring that “clean” copies of endpoint data and configuration settings are available in the event an endpoint is breached. Using a backup, admins can restore an endpoint to a secure state while minimizing the loss of data.
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Conclusion: Endpoint Security as the Linchpin of Cybersecurity
To be sure, endpoint security is just one aspect of overall cybersecurity. Equally important are practices like securing networks and cloud environments. But again, given that endpoints are the building-block of modern IT environments, the better organizations can protect their endpoints, the better positioned they are to establish a strong, proactive cybersecurity posture.
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