Selecting an Endpoint Security Tool: What You Need to Know

The future of your organization depends on your ability to protect it against cyber threats.

Unfortunately, that’s becoming more and more difficult with each passing year as our collective reliance on technology increases, creating more targets for cybercriminals to attack.  

What is the purpose of an endpoint security tool? – A capable endpoint security tool can help you keep sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands and prevent business-critical systems from becoming unavailable after turning into hosts for malware, but selecting it can be difficult.

In this article, we explain everything you need to know to select the right endpoint security tool for your organization—or at least narrow down the list of suitable candidates to a more manageable number.

Understanding the Importance of Endpoint Protection

Your organization has what cybersecurity experts refer to as a digital perimeter. You can think of it as the boundary between internal systems or information and the outside world.

In the early days of computing, digital perimeters were compact and easily identifiable.

As organizations began embracing the benefits of information technology by adopting all kinds of hardware and software solutions and moving important data and workloads from local servers to the cloud, their digital perimeters became larger and fuzzier.

Today, even SMBs with just a few employees rely on dozens of cloud applications, which their employees access from different locations using personal and work devices alike.

The problem is that large and fuzzy digital perimeters are also more porous since not every endpoint device provides a consistent layer of cybersecurity, especially not the millions of Internet of Things devices (IoT) that organizations worldwide connect to their network every day.

That’s where cybersecurity endpoint protection comes in, making it possible to detect, prevent, and remove cyber threats across the entire digital perimeter and all the endpoint devices that make it up.

How to Select an Endpoint Security Tool?

Endpoint security tools are available from a number of different vendors, each boasting a unique set of features and capabilities. If you have no previous experience with them, it can be easy to get lost in an endless sea of buzzwords and product specifications.

Here’s are the most important things you should focus on when selecting an endpoint security tool:

• Compatibility: Every IT environment is different, so you must make sure that your endpoint security tool of choice can accommodate your business applications and specific software and hardware. Ideally, you should test it with a small group of users to see how it works in practice and what its weaknesses are. Fortunately, that’s relatively easy to do since most vendors offer trial versions of their products.
• Detection rates: Just because an endpoint security tool is equipped with cutting-edge intrusion detection technologies doesn’t always mean that its detection rate is excellent. That’s why you should always do your own research and study independent tests before making a financial commitment. If you feel up to the task, you can even test endpoint security tools yourself using readily available malware samples and an isolated test environment.
• Ease of use: Your endpoint security tool should make you more productive by protecting you from cyber threats capable of bringing your entire network down in no time. It should definitely not keep you from focusing on your work by being difficult to use, configure, update, and maintain. Even if you don’t plan on administering it yourself, you should at least ensure that the endpoint security tool generates easy-to-understand alerts and reports.
• Mobile protection: The modern workforce is a mobile workforce, and your endpoint security tool must be able to protect not only computers running desktop operating systems like Windows and macOS but also mobile devices running Android and iOS. Ideally, it should make it possible to remotely lock and wipe lost and stolen devices to prevent them from causing a data breach.
• System footprint: The best endpoint security tools do a lot to protect endpoint devices from cyber threats, from constantly monitoring network activity to analyzing executables using machine learning algorithms to filtering web traffic in real-time. Unless designed from the ground up to utilize as few resources as possible, they can easily become performance hogs and slow down users who are just trying to get work done.

Let Us Help You Make the Right Choice

You can’t be an expert in everything, but you can always borrow the missing experience by finding the right partner.

When it comes to cybersecurity, we at OSIbeyond have a wealth of experience with providing enterprise-grade cybersecurity solutions designed for small to medium-sized organizations, and we would be thrilled to help you not only pick the right endpoint security tool but also implement it.

We know from experience that organizations that make the right decision about their security spend less time administering the solution and handling user complaints, which lets them focus on what their do best. Contact us today and let us help you avoid the potential pitfalls associated with making the wrong security decision.