There’s a simple reason why organizations have recently experienced so many new vulnerabilities and breaches. Over the past year, organizations have transformed their endpoint environment. Yet, they continue using legacy tools to secure and manage their new environments.
What’s changed in the modern endpoint environment
Endpoint environments were small, static, predictable, and relatively easy to manage. They were filled by endpoints that were provisioned from IT and which lived on premises.
Over the past year, however, organizations have:
- The shift from a majority of employees working on-premises to a majority of them working remotely. According to Pew Research Center findings, 71% have continued to work most or all of their work from home compared to 20% pre-pandemic.
- Your perimeters should be dismantled. Organizations spent more than a decade constructing defense-in-depth around the workforce. However, this perimeter was designed to protect and manage endpoints within its walls. It became ineffective once users and their endpoints moved out of the office.
- Flooded their environment by new endpoints and data. Recent research by Statistica shows that organizations have seen a 11% increase in their number of heavily used devices after COVID-19. This has also led to an increase of their volume of connections and data. sensitive data62% of them stored data on their phones, and 176% more collaboration applications were adopted.
Many organizations manage and continue to operate despite making major changes in their environments. Secure their endpoints using legacy tools that were designed for their old environments — with unfortunate results.
Why you can’t apply legacy tools to modern environments
There is nothing fundamentally wrong about legacy endpoint tools. Yesterday’s endpoint tools worked well in yesterday’s endpoint environment.
But when these tools are applied to today’s environment, they typically fail to perform fundamental endpoint management and security tasks. These tools miss a few crucial points.
They can’t easily manage and secure large, evolving environments filled with distributed endpoints.
Most legacy tools are built around a hub and spoke architecture. This requires hundreds to thousands of staging servers for simple security and endpoint management tasks. This structure makes it difficult for them to scale quickly with rapidly changing networks. It also forces them to consume large amounts of bandwidth to scan large networks and apply security controls. Organizations commonly don’t have this bandwidth to spare, creating visibility gaps and low levels of compliance with simple controls.
They can’t deliver the endpoint data that organizations need when they need it. Most legacy tools use central data collection and instrumentation. They must first pull all data from the network to be able to analyze endpoint data. Then, they must store it in a central repository. But today’s sprawling endpoint environments produce more data than legacy tools can quickly centralize. Legacy tools make it difficult for organizations to collect, store and analyze endpoint information in a useful manner. They must also make endpoint management and security decision based on limited, outdated data sets.
These tools make endpoint security and management too complicated and expensive. Most legacy tools were created to solve one problem. This design often forces organizations to use a different point tool for every new asset type or vulnerability that is introduced to their environment. These point tools don’t work well together and create increasing complexity. Ponemon Cyber Resilience Survey recently revealed that 63% of security professionals spend more time managing their tools than they do fighting threats. 53% of them believe that their excessive number of tools is actually making security worse.
These are not isolated instances of failure. These are signs of a fundamental mismatch in legacy tools and modern environments.
Legacy tools are creating problems
This video will show you how this fundamental mismatch could be manifesting in the real world. We surveyed hundreds technology leadersAbout their endpoint security and management tools and how they were implemented
performing. We discovered that:
- Technology leaders have many endpoint tools.70 percent of technology leaders are using more than 50 tools to secure and manage their endpoints. Nearly half (46%) use more than 20 tools and 20% use more than 30. Four percent of respondents don’t know how many tools they’re using.
- Those tools aren’t effective. Many technology leaders aren’t collecting the accurate, real-time security data they need to assess and reduce their risk. Respondents said that their three most difficult risk-related tasks were getting real-time visibility into the data (88%), combining legacy data with cloud infrastructure (79%), or obtaining accurate data (77%).
- It’s time for new, modern endpoint tools.More than half (53%) of respondents are likely to rethink point tools and consolidate endpoint management and security tools by 2021. Respondents also believe that legacy infrastructure is a major obstacle to managing distributed endpoints. 62% believe IT should modernize these tools and move endpoint capabilities into the cloud.
- Legacy tools can’t manage or secure today’s new environments. They’re creating problems that are contributing to — if not outright causing — the increase in breaches and vulnerabilities that we have seen over the past year.
Modernization doesn’t have to be complicated. Technology leaders must simply replace their legacy endpoint tools with modern endpoint tools designed to perform management and security within today’s new environments.
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