Myriad point solutions for endpoint security – are you choosing chaos on purpose?

Comprehensive security – that which spans as many endpoint types used by an organizations as possible – can be a challenge. With BYOD initiatives, virtualization, and public cloud, the variety of endpoints, which contain or have access to corporate data, is increasing.

While large organizations have the means to acquire point solutions, the number of solutions that must be deployed, maintained, and monitored can become cost-prohibitive. Having a solution for each of mobile devices, traditional servers, virtualized servers and desktops, Linux servers, desktops and laptops, and cloud instances is not ideal. If from different vendors, simply learning how to deploy configure each is time-consuming, and must be split between different administrators.

Each point solution also gathers insight into the type of endpoint it protects. To assemble this information across the various silos involves exporting to yet another system to create common view across endpoints. This exercise can be costly and complicated, while also risking the loss of contextual information as data is exported from the originating management console.

Finally, ensuring a common level of security configuration across disparate endpoints is problematic. If leveraging different vendors, or even different consoles from the same vendor, historical differences between systems is often exposed as wildly different policy nomenclature. Seemingly simple concepts like real-time protection may be expressed in very different ways, leading to apples to oranges comparisons between policies.

On the other hand, the cost of not having comprehensive security can be severe. Since end-user and server endpoints contain, or have access to, corporate data, leaving systems unprotected is unwise, to say the least.

Bitdefender has taken a different approach with GravityZone. Different endpoint types, from Amazon Web Services instances, to virtualized servers, laptops and desktops, and mobile devices, are addressed by modules within GravityZone. Each module has been built, from the ground-up, by Bitdefender.

The obvious advantage is the look and feel, as well as functionality, are similar across the modules. This drastically lowers the learning curve, and makes aligning security - and gaining insight – across all protected systems much easier. Organizations can choose one module, or many, depending on their needs.

The cost of implementing comprehensive security should not put it out of reach for organizations, big or small. Also, comprehensive security should not be as complex as it often ends-up; that complexity can lead to things being overlooked, weakening the overall security posture of an organization.

For more information about how GravityZone can help your organization, go to http://www.bitdefender.com/business/