The Covid pandemic has encouraged more employees to adopt a remote or hybrid working culture. According to a survey, 59% of European employees were allowed to work from home in the past 2 years. The work-from-home culture will likely stay despite the easing of restrictive measures in Europe. And along with it, growing endpoint security concerns. 

How remote working culture has reshaped the security landscape

Bringing work back to home introduces new cybersecurity challenges. To ensure productivity, companies allow employees to access corporate information from their home network with personal computers, laptops, and mobile phones. This expands the attack surface beyond a predictable security perimeter and makes these internet-connected devices likely to be targeted by cybercriminals. 

Bad actors had grown brazen and creative in carrying out cyberattacks. They would target known weaknesses rather than forcing their way through an organization’s hardened servers. A laptop with minimum protection can be infected by malware if an employee carelessly falls victim to social engineering or phishing emails. And according to Statista, such incidences caused 54% of ransomware attacks.   

A compromised personal device with access to the corporate network can potentially disrupt operations, compromise data integrity, and results in financial fallouts. For example, the HSE estimated at least €100m of losses due to a large-scale cyberattack in 2021. Like it or not, an increasingly mobile workforce has redrawn your company’s security perimeter and demands an effective mitigative response. 

Key challenges in endpoint protection 

Enforcing security policies on personal devices is more challenging than safeguarding digital assets within an on-premise network. Companies must predict how employees interact with their devices, what applications they download, and if they practice good security habits. Many endpoint security issues stem from unpatched and vulnerable applications, which bad actors use to exploit. 

With the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy, organizations have no oversight of the security posture of large numbers of disparate devices. Without a centralized endpoint security management solution, it is impossible to mitigate evolving threats, such as zero-day attacks. Zero-day attacks capitalize on new-founded vulnerabilities that the software vendor has yet to fix. 

Automating endpoint security protection to safeguard digital assets

Organizations cannot afford to rely on passive prevention methods that turn endpoint devices into sitting ducks for cyber attackers. Instead, they should deploy automated endpoint security solutions to proactively fix vulnerabilities and detect potential threats on all connected devices. Endpoint security aims to stop and isolate a threat before it spreads to other systems. 

Endpoint security is different from traditional antivirus software. The latter’s protection scope is limited to a single device, whereas endpoint security provides consistent protection across all connected devices. A comprehensive endpoint security solution protects not only computers, laptops, and smartphones but also IoT devices, industrial machines, and medical devices.

Final thoughts

Companies embracing hybrid working cultures must balance workplace flexibility with adequate endpoint protection to safeguard their interests. You must stop cyber threats at the new perimeter, which overlaps with personal devices that employees use for work. 

SecTeer offers automated security patch management solutions that help companies bolster endpoint security, increase visibility, and ultimately ensure that you have deployed the latest security and non-security updates.

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