Considering Endpoint Detection and Response? What’s the best EDR choice for your business?

“We are our choices” (John Paul Sartre)

The choices we make shapes our future, and that includes cybersecurity. How we choose to respond to an event decides the outcome - one business faced with a security incident will respond differently to another in a comparable situation. Being prepared with the right incident response plan and choosing the right tools to implement the plan goes a long way to improving your organization’s defenses. Make the right security choices and you will help ensure that your business is one that is cyber resilient.

In my last blog “Considering Endpoint Detection and Response,” I discussed reasons why you should consider Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) as part of your overall cybersecurity strategy .

Challenges include:

Ensuring 100% protection against advanced attacks that allow intruders to remain on your systems
Terminating suspicious activity or isolate infected machines once you notice potential breach indicators
Lack of actionable intelligence or step-by-step advice to follow for how to deal with an identified breach
Lack of a centralized database of threat data for coordinated attack analysis and remediation across systems
Systemic risks facing your infrastructure and how to improve your security posture proactively

Do you want a standalone EDR solution? An integrated Endpoint protection platform (EPP) and EDR solution? Do you prefer the management infrastructure for your EDR solution to be on your premises or cloud-delivered? Would you prefer your managed service provider or security vendor to manage your EDR for you in a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service? You have choices and can take our short assessment to discover what model works best for you.

Below, I set out the case for a standalone EDR solution.

The Case for Standalone EDR

Standalone EDR can immediately enhance the security of any business no matter what endpoint protection solution you are already using. Security leaders might consider standalone EDR to be a valuable addition to EPP when analysts lack visibility into suspicious and malicious activity on their endpoints and network particularly if their existing EPP solution lacks easy, attractive options to add cloud delivered EDR, EDR+EPP or MDR. This means they’ll need an incident detection and reporting capability that is compatible with existing  EPP solution – an incident response platform with a thin and light agent that is easy to deploy and manage and provides simplified step-by-step operational workflows for threat forensics and endpoint remediation.

So, What Comes Next?

EDR continues to be a critical element in organizations’ strategy to close their security gaps. Looking into the future, security leaders are beginning to explore XDR. Extended Detection and Response (XDR) automatically collects and correlates data across multiple enterprise security controls—email, endpoint, server, cloud workloads and network—so that threats can be detected faster, and security analysts can shorten investigations and speed response times across all security controls. This unified security approach delivers complete visibility into data patterns and events across networks, clouds, endpoints and applications while applying analytics and automation to detect, analyze, hunt and remediate advanced threats across the enterprise. This is where Bitdefender’s portfolio is going next - hunt and remediate advanced threats across the enterprise.