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Posts from the ‘endpoint security’ Category

Apr 6

How The Pandemic Is Accelerating Endpoint Security’s Growth

  • 76% of enterprises increased their use of endpoint devices since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting their remote, work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid workforces globally.
  • 66% of enterprises believe securing their networks and infrastructure requires a more focused, proactive approach to endpoint resilience that doesn’t leave endpoint security to chance.
  • Cybersecurity leader’s top challenges today are maintaining compliance, enforcing security standards, and understanding the health of security controls on each endpoint.  
  • Just 38% of IT leaders can track the ROI of their cybersecurity investments, accentuating the need for more resilient, persistent endpoints that provide greater visibility and control.

These and many other fascinating insights are from Forrester Consulting’s latest study on endpoint security, Take Proactive Approach To Endpoint Security, completed in collaboration with Absolute Software. The study is noteworthy for its impartial, accurate view of the current state of endpoint security and the challenges IT teams face in creating greater endpoint resilience. The study’s methodology is based on 157 interviews with IT and security professionals located in the U.S. and Canada who are decision-makers in endpoint protection, with interviews completed in November and December 2020. 

Key insights from the study include the following:

  • Security leaders are reprioritizing endpoint automation efforts with a strong focus on sensitive or at-risk data. In 2021 automation efforts will focus on sensitive or at-risk data (60%), geolocation (52%), security control health (48%), web-based application usage (36%), patch management (35%), and hardware inventory (32%).  Each of these technologies is integral to supporting remote workers. There’s also a significant shift from how automation strategies were prioritized before the pandemic, as the graphic from the study below illustrates:
  • Maintaining compliance, enforcing security standards, understanding security controls’ health, and measuring security investments are the top challenges to managing endpoint security today. The majority of enterprises, 59%, cannot maintain or prove compliance of endpoints at any given time. Lack of compliance drags down the efficiency of endpoint security efforts, making an entire network more vulnerable. Just over half of enterprises can’t enforce security standards across endpoints or don’t know today’s health.  The most surprising finding of the study: 62% of enterprises cannot measure the ROI of their security investments – with half (31%) – strongly disagreeing with how measurable security ROI spend is.   
  • Enterprises see four key areas where endpoint management could improve today. Forrester asked enterprise IT and security leaders which capabilities need to be added to endpoint management systems to make them more effective. The executives first focused on securing sensitive and at-risk data, a sure sign enterprises are moving to a more data-centric cybersecurity model in the future. That’s good news as cyber attackers want to penetrate software supply chains and take control of systems managing data assets. Managing devices remotely at scale is second, which is also a frequent challenge IT and security teams encounter when attempting to patch endpoints. Having an unbreakable digital tether to devices is solving the scale issue while also providing greater endpoint resiliency, visibility, and control.

Conclusion

The pandemic forced every business to become more innovative in supporting work-from-home and hybrid work environments, improving endpoint security an immediate priority. What’s needed is an unbreakable digital tether to all devices, capable of delivering complete visibility and control, enabling real-time insights into the state of those devices, and allowing them to repair security controls and productivity tools autonomously. Of the many solutions available for securing endpoints today, the ones that take a firmware-embedded approach to secure endpoints are proving the most reliable. The more integrated an endpoint is to firmware, the more likely self-healing agents will be reliable while also providing complete visibility across every device on or off the network. Absolute’s firmware-embedded approach is noteworthy in its track record of securing endpoints during the pandemic.  

Mar 23

What Enterprises Need To Plan For In 2021 When It Comes To Endpoint Security

What Enterprises Need to Plan for In 2021 When It Comes to Endpoint Security

Bottom Line: Today’s largely-distributed enterprises need to make sure they are putting endpoint security first in 2021– which includes closely managing every stage of the device lifecycle, from deployment to decommission, and ensuring all sensitive data remains protected.

There’s a looming paradox facing nearly every organization today of how they’ll secure thousands of remote endpoints without having physical access to devices, and without disrupting worker productivity. Whether there’s the need to retire hardware as part of down-sizing or cost-cutting measures, or the need to equip virtual teams with newer equipment more suitable for long term work-from-home scenarios, this is one of the most pressing issues facing CISOs and CIOs today.

Wanting to learn more about how their customers are tackling their endpoint security challenges and how their companies are helping to solve it, I sat down (virtually) with Absolute Software’s President and CEO Christy Wyatt and Matthew Zielinski, President of North America Intelligent Devices Group at Lenovo. The following is my interview with both of them:

Louis Columbus: Christy and Matt, thanks so much for your time today. To get started, I would like each of you to share what you’re hearing from your customers regarding their plans to refresh laptops and other endpoint devices in 2021.

Christy Wyatt: We’re seeing a strong desire from organizations to ensure that every individual is digitally enabled, and has access to a screen. In some cases, that means refreshing the hardware they already have in the field, and in other cases, that means buying or adding devices. From the endpoint security standpoint, there’s been a shift in focus around which tools matter the most. When laptops were primarily being used on campus, there was a certain set of solutions to monitor those devices and ensure they remained secure. Now that 90% of devices are out of the building, an entirely different set of capabilities is required – and delivering those has been our focus.

Matt Zielinski: We are seeing historic levels of demand from consumers, as many are transitioning from having maybe one or two devices per household to at least one device per person. We’re also seeing the same levels of demand on both the education and enterprise side. The new dynamic of work-from-anywhere, learn-from-anywhere, collaborate-from-anywhere underscores that the device hardware and software need to be current in order to support both the productivity and security needs of hugely distributed workforces. That’s our highest priority.

Louis:  Where are CISOs in their understanding, evaluation, and adoption of endpoint security technologies?

Christy: The journey has been different for the education market than for the enterprise market. Most enterprise organizations were already on the digital path, with some percentage of their population already working remotely. And because of this, they typically have a more complex security stack to manage; our data shows that the total number of unique applications and versions installed on enterprise devices is nearly 1.5 million. What they’ve seen is a trifecta of vulnerabilities: employees taking data home with them, accessing it on unsecured connections, and not being aware of how their devices are protected beyond the WiFi connection and the network traffic.

In the education space, the challenges – and the amount of complexity – are completely different; they’re managing just a small fraction of that total number of apps and versions. That said, as the pandemic unfolded, education was hit harder because they were not yet at a point where every individual was digitally connected. There was a lot of reliance on being on campus, or being in a classroom. So, schools had to tackle digital and mobile transformation at the same time – and to their credit, they made multiple years of progress in a matter of weeks or months. This rapid rate of change will have a profound effect on how schools approach technology deployments going forward.

Matt: Whether in enterprise or education, our customers are looking to protect three things: their assets, their data, and their users’ productivity. It’s a daunting mission. But, the simplest way to accomplish it is to recognize the main control point has changed. It’s no longer the server sitting behind the firewall of your company’s or school’s IT environment. The vulnerability of the endpoint is that the network is now in the user’s hands; the edge is now the primary attack surface. I think CISOs realize this, and they are asking the right questions… I just don’t know if everyone understands the magnitude or the scale of the challenge. Because the problem is so critical, though, people are taking the time to make the right decisions and identify all the various components needed to be successful.

Louis:   It seems like completing a laptop refresh during the conditions of a pandemic could be especially challenging, given how entire IT teams are remote. What do you anticipate will be the most challenging aspects of completing a hardware refresh this year (2021)?

Matt:  The PC has always been a critical device for productivity. But now, without access to that technology, you are completely paralyzed; you can’t collaborate, you can’t engage, you can’t connect. Lenovo has always been focused on pushing intelligent transformation as far as possible to get the best devices into the hands of our customers. Beyond designing and building the device, we have the ability to distribute asset tags and to provide a 24/7 help desk for our customers whether you’re a consumer, a school, or a large institution. We can also decommission those devices at the end, so we’re able to support the entire journey or lifecycle.

The question has really become, how do you deliver secure devices to the masses? And, we’re fully equipped to do that. For example, every Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop comes out of the box with Lenovo Security Assurance, which is actually powered by Absolute; it is in our hardware. Our customers can open a Lenovo PC, and know that it is completely secure, right out of the box. Every one of our laptops is fortified with Absolute’s Persistence technology and self-healing capabilities that live in the BIOS. It’s that unbreakable, secure connection that makes it possible for us to serve our customers throughout the entire lifecycle of device ownership.

Louis: Why are the legacy approaches to decommissioning assets falling short / failing today? How would you redesign IT asset-decommissioning approaches to make them more automated, less dependent on centralized IT teams?

Christy: There have been a few very visible cases over the past year of highly regulated organizations, experiencing vulnerabilities because of how they decommissioned – or did not properly decommission – their assets. But, I don’t want anyone to believe that that this is a problem that is unique to regulated industries, like financial services. The move to the cloud has given many organizations a false sense of security, and it seems that the more data running in the cloud, the more pronounced this false sense of security becomes. It’s a mistaken assumption to think that when hardware goes missing, the security problem is solved by shutting down password access and that all the data is protected because it is stored in the cloud. That’s just not true. When devices aren’t calling in anymore, it’s a major vulnerability – and the longer the device sits without being properly wiped or decommissioned, the greater the opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of those assets.

The other piece that should be top of mind is that once a device is decommissioned, it’s often sold. We want to ensure that nothing on that device gets passed on to the next owner, especially if it’s going to a service or leasing program. So, we’ve concentrated on making asset decommissioning as precise as possible and something that can be done at scale, anytime and anywhere.

Matt:  Historically, reclaiming and decommissioning devices has required physical interaction. The pandemic has limited face-to-face encounters, so , we’re leveraging many different software solutions to give our customers the ability to wipe the device clean if they aren’t able to get the asset back in their possession, so that at least they know it is secure. Since we’re all now distributed, we’re looking at several different solutions that will help with decommissioning, several of which are promising and scale well given today’s constraints. Our goal is to provide our enterprise customers with decommissioning flexibility, from ten units to several thousand.

Louis:  Paradoxically, having everyone remote has made the business case for improving endpoint security more compelling too. What do you hear from enterprises about accelerating digital transformation initiatives that include the latest-generation endpoint devices?

Christy:  The same acceleration that I spoke about on the education side, we absolutely see on the enterprise side as well, and with rapid transformation comes increased complexity. There has been a lot of conversation about moving to Zero Trust, moving more services to the cloud and putting more controls on the endpoint – and not having these sort of layers in between. Our data tells us that the average enterprise device today has 96 unique applications, and at least 10 of them are security applications. That is a massive amount of complexity to manage. So, we don’t believe that adding more controls to the endpoint is the answer; we believe that what’s most important is knowing the security controls you have are actually working. And we need to help devices and applications become more intelligent, self-aware, and capable of fixing themselves. This concept of resiliency is the cornerstone of effective endpoint security, and a critical part of the shift to a more modern security architecture.

Matt: I think there are two major forcing functions: connection and security. Because we are all now remote, there’s a huge desire to feel connected to one another even though we aren’t sitting in the same room together. We’re modifying our products in real-time with the goal of removing shared pain points and optimizing for the new reality in which we’re all living and working. Things like microphone noise suppression and multiple far field microphones, so that if the dog barks or kids run into a room, the system will mute before you’ve even pressed the mute button. We’re improving camera technology from a processing standpoint to make things look better. Ultimately, our goal is to provide an immersive and connected experience.

Security, however, transcends specific features that deliver customer experiences – security is the experience. The features that make hardware more secure are those that lie beneath the operating system, in the firmware. That is why we have such a deep network of partners, including Absolute. Because you need to have a full ecosystem, and a program that takes advantage of all the best capabilities, in order to deliver the best security solution possible.

Louis: How is Absolute helping enterprise customers ensure greater endpoint security and resiliency in 2021 and beyond?

Christy: We spend a lot of time sitting with customers to understand their needs and how and where we can extend our endpoint security solutions to fit. We believe in taking a layered approach – which is the framework for defense in-depth, and an effective endpoint security strategy. The foundational piece, which we are able to deliver, is a permanent digital tether to every device; this is the lifeline. Not having an undeletable connection to every endpoint means you have a very large security gap, which must be closed fast. A layered, persistence-driven approach ensures our customers know their security controls are actually working and delivering business value. It enables our customers to pinpoint where a vulnerability is and take quick action to mitigate it.

Lenovo’s unique, high value-add approach to integrated security has both helped drive innovation at Absolute, while also providing Lenovo customers the strongest endpoint security possible. Their multilayer approach to their endpoint strategy capitalizes on Absolute’s many BIOS-level strengths to help their customers secure every endpoint they have. As our companies work together, we are both benefitting from a collaboration that seeks to strengthen and enrich all layers of endpoint security. Best of all, our shared customers are the benefactors of this collaboration and the results we are driving at the forefront of endpoint security.

Louis:  How has the heightened focus on enterprise cybersecurity in general, and endpoint security specifically, influenced Lenovo’s product strategy in 2021 and beyond?

Matt:  We have always been focused on our unique cybersecurity strengths from the device side and making sure we have all of the control points in manufacturing to ensure we build a secure platform. So, we’ve had to be open-minded about endpoint security, and diligent in envisioning how potential vulnerabilities and attack strategies can be thwarted before they impact our customers. Because of this mindset, we’re fortunate to have a very active partner community. We’re always scouring the earth for the next hot cybersecurity technology and potential partner with unique capabilities and the ability to scale with our model. This is a key reason we’ve standardized on Absolute for endpoint security, as it can accommodate a wide breadth of deployment scenarios. It’s a constant and very iterative process with a team of very smart people constantly looking at how we can excel at cybersecurity. It is this strategy that is driving us to fortify our Lenovo Security Assurance architecture over the long-term, while also seeking new ways of providing insights from existing and potentially new security applications.

Louis: What advice are you giving CISOs to strengthen endpoint security in 2021 and beyond?

Christy: One of our advisors is the former Global Head of Information Security at Citi Group, and former CISO of JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. He talks a lot about his shared experiences of enabling business operations, while defending organizations from ever-evolving threats, and the question that more IT and security leaders need to be asking – which is, “Is it working?” Included in his expert opinion is that cybersecurity needs to be integral to business strategy – and endpoint security is essential for creating a broader secure ecosystem that can adapt as a company’s needs change.

I believe there needs to be more boardroom-level conversations around how compliance frameworks can be best used to achieve a balance between cybersecurity and business operations. A big part of that is identifying resiliency as a critical KPI for measuring the strength of endpoint controls.

 

Oct 26

Absolute’s CEO Christy Wyatt On The Future Of Endpoint Security

Absolute's CEO Christy Wyatt On The Future Of Endpoint Security

Removing any doubt endpoints are resilient, self-healing and secure is what matters most to cybersecurity leaders today. It has become the highest priority across education, enterprise, financial services and government organizations in 2020 and beyond. At the same time, CIOs and CISOs are recognizing that endpoint complexity itself is a vulnerability. Absolute’s 2020 State of Endpoint Resilience Report​  finds there are now 10.2 agents per endpoint installed, up from 9.8. Add to this how quickly software agents degrade across thousands of remote devices and the size of the challenge becomes clear. 

Absolute’s approach to delivering unified endpoint security using their Endpoint Resilience platform that creates a permanent digital tether to every endpoint in the enterprise is getting noticed by CIOs and CISOs. IT leaders say Absolute’s ability to provide greater visibility and control is what they need. Interested in learning more about how Absolute is helping customers taking on the many challenges of protecting the proliferating number of endpoints today and how the company sees the future, I recently spoke with Christy Wyatt, CEO. (You can see my discussion with her last year here.)

Under her leadership, Absolute’s revenues, customer retention and Net Income continue to grow. Total revenue in Q4-FY2020 was $27.2M, representing a year-over-year increase of 7%. Annual revenue in FY2020 was $104.7M, representing an increase of 6% over F2019. Absolute also attained a 14% year-over-year increase in Enterprise and Government revenue making this segment 68% of Total ARR on June 30, 2020.

Christy is one of the most brilliant, insightful leaders in cybersecurity today and her perspective on the future of endpoint security makes for a fascinating discussion. The following is my interview with her:  

Louis: When you look back over the last eight months, which decisions and strategies do you see as being pivotal to Absolute’s growth and the fact that you accomplished so much, so quickly?

Christy: That’s a great question and the first thing that jumps to mind is our decision that Endpoint Resilience needs to be its own category. This was kind of a new thing. Many people talk about finding bad guys and the need for identity and access management.. there is a lot of use of the fear factor. And as an industry, we kept thinking of different ways devices could be compromised and we kept adding more security controls to solve those problems.

The thesis we arrived at, here at Absolute, is, “Listen, more isn’t always better. Making sure that things are actually working in there when you need them, that’s what is more important.” Because when you spend a lot of money on solutions, or when you tell your board or your CEO that you have a particular control and are now safe from a specific kind of risk… you need to go to sleep at night knowing that that’s in fact true. There needs to be a foundational belief that there is something solid to stand on when bad things happen.

And so, much of what we did this past year was really focused on quantifying that rate of decay because we believe that it is a painful problem organizations are having. I think that we are making traction and the insights we continue to publish on the state of Endpoint Resilience is really helping with that.

Louis: On your last earnings call, you talked about undeletable endpoint security and how it caught on in the education market. Did you change your go-to-market strategy this quarter to show you could scale an enterprise-wide deployment with teachers and administrators?

Christy: What’s important to remember is that we’ve been in business 20 years and that we started in education – as the one-to-one laptop initiatives for school kids were just getting underway. Those devices were very expensive and so that is the first problem we worked to solve. If somebody got their hands on a student’s device, how do you build a security platform that can survive anything that happens to that device? That was the original design premise all those years ago. And so, we have deep experience in things like scalability and solving problems for the education market.

What we’ve been seeing n the education market over the last couple of years has really been that, while technology has been an enabler for students, they weren’t necessarily thinking about teachers and administrators. So the challenge that they’ve grappled with over the last few months, notably with the accelerated shift to remote learning, is figuring out how to be both a digital and remote organization all at once. A lot of their processes were not yet online and not every single individual was connected.

Because we have a long-standing relationship with this community, we have a lot of expertise in the providing the scale and stability that they need. It was relatively intuitive for us to step and say, “Listen, these are things we can help you with. Here’s the bigger picture of things we could be helping you with, as you’re still figuring out distance learning and how to mobilize students.” Because we’ve also while serving education, we’ve also been serving banks and governments – and our enterprise business has been growing quite nicely over the years as well.

And I think we’re going to see that continue, because even as schools are contemplating sending children back to school, nobody knows whether this is a long-term or short-term. The new term I’ve started using is operational agility… and I think it applies to enterprise as well as it goes to education. I don’t think we ever again get to take for granted location and physical proximity to employees or students or devices. It has become a critical KPI for most organizations going forward.

Louis: Excellent point. And with regard to enterprise and government sectors growing 14% annually, what did you see in the eight months of this year that led to the double-digit growth in those markets?

Christy: Very few organizations had ever really contemplated the question, “What would happen if everybody had to be remote at a moment’s notice?” While our enterprise business has been experiencing double-digit growth for quite a while now, the onset of the pandemic really accelerated that growth. There has been a shift in thinking, that working remotely is not just for a smaller population of road warriors and sales reps and executives. I’ve spoken with many organizations that would say having a permanent digital connection to a device is really important for the people who are on airplanes and in a taxi cabs. But, I have a large percentage of my population that has a device that really they only use at work. Maybe it’s a laptop, maybe it’s a desktop – but either way, 99% of the time they are here. Or the times that they’re not here, they can VPN in. And I think that’s really become the challenge, that we can’t make that assumption anymore.

A lot of customers are rethinking all of that right now, as they’re seeing that being a remote, digitally-led organization can actually fit within their business model. If they give employees the flexibility to do what they love, where they want to do it, they’ll have an edge. While this is something that’s been forced on us, as with many things, the more you practice, the better you get… and then at some point, it becomes a part of the company’s DNA. And you learn to trust that you’re going to be safe and secure, your data and your employees are going to be just fine, because you don’t lose connection with them just because you can’t see them.

Louis: I think trust is an accelerator and Absolute’s success with endpoint security shows how to enable it at scale across organizations. Now with 13,000 customers, Absolute’s approach to building trust is working well.

On the earnings call you gave guidance of $112M to $118M with between 7% to 13% growth defined by how accounting transactions are handled. Underneath those figures, what’s the customer segment or what’s the geographic segment that you believe will be the primary catalyst for that revenue growth?

Christy: Perhaps a bit unusually for company our size, a large percentage of our revenue is actually North America-based. Our international markets have been some of the fastest growing segments for us. Our ecosystem of partners that we support – notably, the large PC and device manufacturers and their indirect channels – most of those are global entities and would like to support their customers in the same way internationally that they support them in North America. So one big focus for us is doing more selling and marketing globally, to meet this need.

I think the other big catalyst is going to be this shift to Resilience. We have a lot of customers who still rely on us for making sure they’re always connected to their devices and able to take preventative action – such as selectively wiping images or freezing a device, or geo-fencing a device from specific locations. While that’s certainly a critical set of capabilities, because we’re sitting in the hardware and sort of looking up at the software, we can help with this concept of self-healing. We can make sure that the critical controls you care about are truly working and protecting your employees.

A lot of the conversations we’re having, especially with new customers, are really focused on these capabilities. It’s not just, “How do I make sure I always know where my things are and that I can take action on them no matter where they are?” Instead, it’s “how do I use automated workflows to remediate risk? How do I have devices fix themselves so that my IT people don’t have to drown and help those calls?”

This concept of persistence and true self-healing that’s rooted in the hardware, I think is really, really powerful.. and the value of that really starts to become apparent when we’re in a world that looks like this. So I think those are some big focus areas for us as we go in the next year.

Louis: I like that one point you made on the earnings call about intelligence efforts, providing more data in a more interactive way for customers. I thought that that was really insightful and I think relevant to what you’ve been saying throughout our discussion. How do you help customers see themselves in a new way with new metrics, more interactively, more intuitively with greater insight?

Christy:  It’s a different view for us and it’s something I’m very excited about. When it comes to a new product, I focus on, “What’s the question the customer’s going to be asking? What’s the problem they’re trying to solve?” And from there, “How do I package that up neatly so that they click on a button and get a report and it solves all of their problems?” But that’s not the world we live in today, especially when you have so many moving parts and things are continuously changing.

So it’s a different design philosophy when we say to the team, “You actually have no idea what question the customer is going to ask. Your job is to create tools that allow them to ask any question they have and then help them define the answer, either using our tool or using our data in some other tool.” At the end of the day, that’s how they get closer to the truth about what’s going on within their organization… and how they gain the ability to make better decisions.

Louis: Absolutely, that’s key to creating a culture that can continues to innovate and with Absolute’s focus on helping customers attain greater autonomous endpoint resiliency, it’s proving to be a strong catalyst for future growth too.

Aug 2

Improving Online Learning Experiences One Secured Endpoint At A Time

Improving Online Learning Experiences One Secured Endpoint At A Time

Bottom Line: Defining the perfect mix of cloud apps, platforms and secured endpoints to create compelling online learning experiences customizable to students’ learning strengths is how schools are overcoming the challenge of virtual teaching.

There are over 56 million students in the U.S. alone who are relying on remote learning apps, platforms and autonomous endpoint security to protect them as they pursue their education. School districts, online educators and teachers quickly realized the move to 100% online classes could mean the end to outdated mechanized approaches to teaching. Eager to teach using technologies that tailor individual learning programs to every student’s unique learning strengths, schools are combining cloud, e-learning and endpoint security with strong results. Combining technologies gives every student regardless of their socioeconomic background a chance to excel. The goal is to provide unique personalized instruction at scale using a teaching technique called scaffolding. Scaffolding stresses creating an individual learning plan for each student complete with reinforcement for each lesson.

Why Cybersecurity Is The Cornerstone Of Online Learning 

Tailoring the latest technologies to the diverse needs of online learners is the easy part of creating an online learning program. Far more difficult is choosing the right endpoint security strategies to protect their identities, every one of their video conference sessions with peers and teachers and thwarting breach attempts. Parents, teachers, students and administrators all need to trust an e-learning platform to make it work. The bottom line is an e-learning platform needs to create and grow trust while being adaptive enough to meet students’ unique learning needs.

Interested in learning more about how leading online educators are bringing together the latest cloud and autonomous endpoint security technologies to help students learn online, I recently interviewed Eric Ramos Chief Technology Officer at Duarte Unified School District and Dean Phillips, Senior Technology Director, David Atkins, Director of Marketing and Communications and Jennifer Shoaf, Deputy Chief Academic Officer at PA Cyber.  Duarte Unified School District (USD) serves the educational needs of 3,400 scholars at the elementary, K-8 and high school levels. The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School (PA Cyber) in Midland, PA, is one of the most experienced and successful online K-12 public schools in the nation serving over 12,000 students. Together the group of education professionals provided valuable insights into how educators can combine cloud, collaboration and cybersecurity applications to create more personalized, effective learning experiences for students. David Atkins of PA Cyber says that their approach to e-learning is succeeding because they take a fully holistic view of the student, their family and their situation. “Our collaboration with the student starts from the very moment that there’s interest in having some sort of cyber education. And we go from enrollments, all the way through any issues of that students could have, or the students family could have and take them all the way through graduation’ David said. “We take the time to listen and see the student as a complete person.”

The following are the key insights based on our conversations:

  • Choosing to make cybersecurity the highest priority treats students as customers, protecting their unique online learning experiences while providing excellent access across all socioeconomic levels. That’s when online learning experiences excel. What’s impressive how committed the team of educators I spoke with is about making technology work as a catalyst to help every student achieve their educational goals across all socioeconomic levels. They’re also the most advanced at tailoring complex technologies to deliver customized online learning experiences with PA Cyber serving 12,000 remote students at once. “Each of our students is different and they’re looking to accomplish different things and they learn in different ways. We have a different classroom options that they can choose from. And we have a lot of different scaffolding options in place when it comes to our instructional platform, “Jennifer Shoaf, Deputy Chief Academic Officer at PA Cyber said. Eric Ramos, CTO at USD says that he and his staff “reach out to teachers and staff members and provide them with the latest cybersecurity alerts and make sure they are aware of how their autonomous endpoint security platform is securing every laptop and making their job of staying in compliance to security protocols easy.” Eric continued saying that, “having an undeletable digital tether gives my staff, senior educators and me peace of mind, especially with summer here and the need to keep track of the Chromebooks out with students and families.”
  • The more resilient the autonomous endpoint security on the laptop, the easier it is to secure, upgrade and locate each of them if they’re lost or stolen. Duarte Unified School District provides Chromebooks to students for use all year long, often also providing an Internet HotSpot as many students’ families don’t have Internet access. PA Cyber provides students a Dell laptop and an entire technology kit that includes printers and peripherals as well. Having an undeletable digital tether to every laptop makes it possible to keep every system up to date on security and system patches. Dean Phillips, Senior Technology Director at PA Cyber, says that it’s been very helpful to know each laptop has active autonomous endpoint security running at all times. Dean says that endpoint management is a must-have for PA Cyber “We’re using Absolute’s Persistence to ensure an always-on, two-way connection with our IT management solution, Kaseya®, which we use to remotely push out security patches, new applications and scripts. That’s been great for students’ laptops as we can keep updates current and know where the system is. Without an endpoint management solution on student laptops, it is very difficult to manage endpoints without that agent. So Absolute absolutely helps us with that as well. That’s been a big plus.” Eric Ramos, CTO, says that “Absolute has been great, especially when student calls in and says they can’t find their laptop. I don’t know where it is. It’s lost or maybe stolen. We’re able to pull that up, figure out the last time it got pinged and we can locate that usually. Nine times out of 10, the student finds it by next day by just having that information. So that’s been crucial. It’s always been something we love having.”
  • Standardize on a secure cloud platform that is flexible enough to support scaffolding or individualized learning yet hardened enough to protect every laptop connected to it via an undeletable digital tether. A major challenge both online schools face is keeping their cloud platforms adaptive enough to support students’ varying skills yet also secure enough to protect every student online.  Dean Phillips, Senior Technology Director at PA Cyber, says that it’s best to “keep technology as simple as possible for the students and families. Standardization is key, I think, with everything you do from a technology standpoint. Making sure that you build from the inside out from the core. Your applications and networks and making sure that that’s consistent all the way to the endpoint, I think that’s extremely important.” PA Cyber’s lessons learned creating a secure and adaptive e-learning platform makes the goal of providing personalized instruction for every student achievable at scale.  Jennifer Shoaf, Deputy Chief Academic Officer at PA Cyber, explains how the school personalizes online instruction for every student. “It all starts when the student first comes to PA Cyber and we try to get an understanding of where they are and where they should be and where they want to see themselves, whether it’s in a month or in a couple years, or when they graduate from our school. So one of the things that we pride ourselves on here at this school is allowing for multiple modes of instruction for our students,” Jennifer said.
  • Capitalizing on the excellent asset management reporting autonomous endpoint security solutions have, CTOs and senior IT directors are gaining new insights into how to improve learning effectiveness. Having resilient, persistent connections to every endpoint with an undeletable digital tether also provides invaluable asset management data. Eric Ramos of Duarte USD and Dean Phillips of PA Cyber are leaders in this area of e-learning today. Eric Ramos says that asset management and activity reports made possible by the autonomous endpoint platform he is using from Absolute makes getting prepared for senior management meetings easy. “During principal meetings, I’m able to pull up these reports and say, look, these were the goals at the beginning of the year to use these four products at this amount of time. And here’s where you’re at on a small window. Or you can look at it over time and saying, this has been an increase here, this is a decrease here, these sites are doing really well with it, these sites may be not. But let’s now talk about what’s working for you. What are your teachers liking about the particular program? Or, program aside, how are your results coming about?” Eric Ramos, CTO said.

Conclusion

Delivering an excellent online learning experience needs to start with a cybersecurity strategy that includes autonomous endpoint security. Duarte USD and PA Cyber are leaders in this field, being among the first to see how combining core technologies while having an undeletable digital tether to every laptop is a must-have. Earning and growing the trust of parents, students, teachers and school administrators start with an endpoint security strategy that can adapt and grow as an e-learning program does.

Jun 28

Why Securing Endpoints Is The Future Of Cybersecurity

Why Securing Endpoints Is The Future Of Cybersecurity

  • 86% of all breaches are financially motivated, where threat actors are after company financial data, intellectual property, health records, and customer identities that can be sold fast on the Dark Web.
  • 70% of breaches are perpetrated by external actors, making endpoint security a high priority in any cybersecurity strategy.
  •  55% of breaches originate from organized crime groups.
  • Attacks on Web apps accessed from endpoints were part of 43% of breaches, more than double the results from last year.

These and many other insights are from Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), downloadable here (PDF, 119 pp. free, opt-in). One of the most-read and referenced data breach reports in cybersecurity, Verizon’s DBIR, is considered the definitive source of annual cybercrime statistics. Verizon expanded the scope of the report to include 16 industries this year, also providing break-outs for Asia-Pacific (APAC); Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA); Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC); and North America, Canada, and Bermuda, which Verizon says is experiencing more breaches (NA).

The study’s methodology is based on an analysis of a record total of 157,525 incidents. Of those, 32,002 met Verizon’s quality standards, and 3,950 were confirmed data breaches. The report is based on an analysis of those findings. Please see Appendix A for the methodology.

Key insights include the following:

  • Verizon’s DBIR reflects the stark reality that organized crime-funded cybercriminals are relentless in searching out unprotected endpoints and exploiting them for financial gain, which is why autonomous endpoints are a must-have today. After reading the 2020 Verizon DBIR, it’s clear that if organizations had more autonomous endpoints, many of the most costly breaches could be averted. Autonomous endpoints that can enforce compliance, control, automatically regenerating, and patching cybersecurity software while providing control and visibility is the cornerstone of cybersecurity’s future. For endpoint security to scale across every threat surface, the new hybrid remote workplace is creating an undeletable tether to every device as a must-have for achieving enterprise scale.
  • The lack of diligence around Asset Management is creating new threat surfaces as organizations often don’t know the current health, configurations, or locations of their systems and devices. Asset Management is a black hole in many organizations leading to partial at best efforts to protect every threat surface they have. What’s needed is more insightful data on the health of every device. There are several dashboards available, and one of the most insightful is from Absolute, called the Remote Work and Distance Learning Insights Center. An example of the dashboard shown below:
  • 85% of victims and subjects were in the same country, 56% were in the same state, and 35% were even in the same city based on FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) data. Cybercriminals are very opportunistic when it comes to attacking high-profile targets in their regions of the world. Concerted efforts of cybercriminals funded by organized crime look for the weakest threat surfaces to launch an attack on, and unprotected endpoints are their favorite target. What’s needed is more of a true endpoint resilience approach that is based on a real-time, unbreakable digital tether that ensures the security of every device and the apps and data it contains.
  • Cloud assets were involved in about 24% of breaches this year, while on-premises assets are still 70%. Ask any CISO what the most valuable lesson they learned from the pandemic has been so far, and chances are they’ll say they didn’t move to the cloud quickly enough. Cloud platforms enable CIOs and CISOs to provide a greater scale of applications for their workforces who are entirely remote and a higher security level. Digging deeper into this, cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) provides invaluable real-time analysis, alerts, and deterrence of potential breaches. Today it’s the exceptional rather than the rule that CISOs prefer on-premise over cloud-based SIEM and endpoint security applications. Cloud-based endpoint platforms and the apps they support are the future of cybersecurity as all organizations now are either considering or adopting cloud-based cybersecurity strategies.
  • Over 80% of breaches within hacking involve brute force or the use of lost or stolen credentials. One of the most valuable insights from the Verizon DBIR is how high of a priority cybercriminals are placing on stealing personal and privileged access credentials. Shutting down potential breach attempts from stolen passwords involves keeping every endpoint completely up to date on software updates, monitoring aberrant activity, and knowing if anyone is attempting to change the configuration of a system as an administrator. By having an unbreakable digital tether to every device, greater control and real-time response to breach attempts are possible.

Conclusion

Autonomous endpoints that can self-heal and regenerate operating systems and configurations are the future of cybersecurity, a point that can be inferred from Verizon’s DBIR this year. While CIOs are more budget-focused than ever, CISOs are focused on how to anticipate and protect their enterprises from new, emerging threats. Closing the asset management gaps while securing every endpoint is a must-have to secure any business today. There are several cybersecurity companies offering endpoint security today. Based on customer interviews I’ve done, one of the clear leaders in endpoint resilience is Absolute Software, whose persistent-firmware technology allows them to self-heal their own agent, as well as any endpoint security control and productivity tool on any protected device such as their Resilience suite of applications.

Dec 9

Why Cybersecurity Needs To Focus More On Customer Endpoints

Why Cybersecurity Needs To Focus More On Customer Endpoints

  • Cloud-based endpoint protection platforms (EPP) are proliferating across enterprises today as CIOs and CISOs prioritize greater resiliency in their endpoint security strategies going into 2020.
  • Gartner predicts that Global Information Security and Risk Management end-user spending is forecast to grow at a five-year CAGR of 9.2% to reach $174.5 billion in 2022, with approximately $50B spent on endpoint security.
  • Endpoint security tools are 24% of all IT security spending, and by 2020 global IT security spending will reach $128B according to Morgan Stanley Research.
  • 70% of all breaches still originate at endpoints, despite the increased IT spending on this threat surface, according to IDC.

There’s a surge of activity happening right now in enterprises that are prioritizing more resiliency in their endpoint security strategies going into 2020. The factors motivating CIOs, CISOs, IT, and Practice Directors to prioritize endpoint resiliency include more effective asset management based on real-time data while securing and ensuring every endpoint can heal itself using designed-in regenerative software at the BIOS level of every device. CIOs say the real-time monitoring helps reduce asset management operating expense, a big plus many of them appreciate give their tight budgets. Sean Maxwell, Chief Commercial Officer at Absolute, says, “Trust is at the center of every endpoint discussion today as CIOs, CISOs and their teams want the assurance every endpoint will be able to heal itself and keep functioning.”

The Endpoint Market Is Heating Up Going Into 2020

Over thirty vendors are competing in the endpoint security market right now. A few of the most interesting are Absolute Software, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and others who are seeing a surge of activity from enterprises based on discussions with CIOs and CISOs. Absolute Software’s Persistence self-healing endpoint security technology is embedded in the firmware of more than 500 million devices and gives CIOs, CISOs and their team’s complete visibility and control over devices and data. Absolute is the leading visibility and control platform that provides enterprises with tamper-proof resilience and protection of all devices, data, and applications.

Like Absolute, Microsoft is unique in how they are the only vendor to provide built-in endpoint protection at the device level, with the core focus being on the OS. Windows 10 has Windows Defender Antivirus now integrated at the OS level, the same System Center Endpoint Protection delivers in Windows 7 and 8 OS. Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) incident response console aggregates alerts and incident response activities across Microsoft Defender ATP, Office 365 ATP, Azure ATP, and Active Directory, in addition to Azure.

Further evidence of how enterprise customers are placing a high priority on endpoint security is the increase in valuations of key providers in this market, including Absolute Software (TSE: ABT) and others. Absolute’s stock price has jumped 13% in just a month, following their latest earnings announcement on November 12th with a transcript of their earnings call here. Absolute’s CEO Christy Wyatt commented during the company’s most recent earnings call that, “The ability to utilize near real-time data from the endpoint to… to deliver actionable insights to IT about where controls are failing and the ability to apply resilience to self-heal and reinforce those security controls will become a critical skill for every one of our customers. This is the essence of Absolute’s platform, which adds resiliency to our customer’s operations.” It’s evident from what CIOs and CISOs are saying that resiliency is transforming endpoint security today and will accelerate in 2020.

Key Takeaways From Conversations With Enterprise Cybersecurity Leaders

The conversations with CIOs, CISOs, and IT Directors provided valuable insights into why resiliency is becoming a high priority for endpoint security strategies today. The following are key takeaways from the conversations:

  • Known humorously as the “fun button” cybersecurity teams enjoy being able to brick any device any time while monitoring the activity happening on it in real-time. One CIO told the story of how their laptops had been given to a service provider who was supposed to destroy them to stay in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and one had been resold on the back market, ending up in a 3rd world nation. As the hacker attempted to rebuild the machine, the security team watched as each new image was loaded, at which time they would promptly brick the machine. After 19 tries, the hacker gave up and called the image re-build “brick me.”
  • IT budgets for 2020 are flat or slightly up, with many CIOs being given the goal of reducing asset management operating expenses, making resiliency ideal for better managing device costs. The more effectively assets are managed, the more secure an organization becomes. That’s another motivating factor motivating enterprises to adopt resiliency as a core part of the endpoint security strategies.
  • One CIO was adamant they had nine software agents on every endpoint, but Absolute’s Resilience platform found 16, saving the enterprise from potential security gaps. The gold image an enterprise IT team was using had inadvertently captured only a subset of the total number of software endpoints active on their networks. Absolute’s Resilience offering and Persistence technology enabled the CIO to discover gaps in endpoint security the team didn’t know existed before.
  • Endpoints enabled with Resiliency have proven their ability to autonomously self-heal themselves, earning the trust of CIOs and CISOs, who are adopting Absolute to alleviate costly network interruptions and potential breaches in the process. 19% of endpoints across a typical IT network require at least one client or patch management repair monthly, according to Absolute’s 2019 Endpoint Security Trends Report. The report also found that increasing security spending on protecting endpoints doesn’t increase an organizations’ safety – and in some instances, reduces it. Having a systematic, design-in solution to these challenges gives CIOs, CISO, and their teams greater peace of mind and reduces expensive interruptions and potential breaches that impede their organizations’ growth.

 

Nov 10

Improving Endpoint Security Needs To Be A Top Goal In 2020

Improving Endpoint Security Needs To Be A Top Goal In 2020

Bottom Line:  Attacking endpoints with AI, bots, and machine learning is gaining momentum with cybercriminals today with no signs of slowing down into 2020, making endpoint security a must-have cybersecurity goal for next year.

Cyberattacks are growing more complex and difficult to prevent now and will accelerate in the future, making endpoint security a top goal in 2020. Cybercriminals are using structured and unstructured machine learning algorithms to hack organizations’ endpoints with increasing frequency. Endpoint attacks and their levels of complexity will accelerate as cybercriminals gain greater mastery of these techniques.

In response, endpoint protection providers are adopting machine learning-based detection and response technologies, providing more cloud-native solutions that can scale across a broader range of endpoints, and designing in greater persistence and resilience for each endpoint. The recent IDC survey published this month, Do You Think Your Endpoint Security Strategy Is Up to Scratch? completed in collaboration with HP recommends that “companies should seek to build resilience — on the assumption that breaches are inevitable — and look for “security by design” features that facilitate or automate detection and recovery.” IDC surveyed 500 senior security executives globally, finding major differences between leading organizations who realize endpoint security is essential for a unified cybersecurity strategy and followers, who don’t.

What Differentiates The Most Effective Endpoint Strategies? 

IDC’s study found that leaders who integrate endpoint security into their cybersecurity plans are more effective at compliance reporting, endpoint hardening, and attack detection and response. Leaders capitalize on the data from their endpoint security strategies, creating contextual intelligence that helps protect their most vulnerable threat surfaces. The following are key insights from the IDC study showing why endpoint security needs to be an integral part of any corporate-wide cybersecurity strategy:

  • 29.6% of all enterprises globally consider endpoint security to be a significant component of their overall cybersecurity strategy, with leaders 2X as likely to consider it a high priority. Close to half of all enterprises (49.4%) believe endpoint security can perform effectively as a secondary component. IDC found that the lesser the priority security leaders place on endpoint security, the more likely endpoints will fail. Instead of taking a strategic approach, organizations treat endpoint security as an isolated strategy, adding an average of 10 security agents per device according to Absolute’s 2019 Endpoint Security Trends Report. You can get a copy of the report here. Cybersecurity leaders realize that having a unified endpoint security strategy designed for persistence and resilience is far more effective than relying on an isolated one. The following findings from the IDC report illustrate how leaders view endpoint as integral to their cybersecurity strategies.
  • When enterprises are complacent about endpoint security, procurement standards become mediocre over time and leave digital businesses at greater risk. Followers lack security focus for everything other than desktops during procurement, for example. Though most enterprises include security requirements in procurement requests, those requirements are not specified equally for all endpoint device types, resulting in uneven security coverage and compliance risk.
  • Automated operating system image recoverability, detect and recover firmware integrity breaches, and enabling software monitoring from the hardware level are the three most in-demand endpoint security features for enterprises today. Leader enterprises have relied on persistent connections to every endpoint in a network to achieve greater resilience across their global networks. Absolute is working to change this relationship, allowing remote, disconnected endpoints to remain resilient, which reflects what leaders are looking for in terms of greater control and visibility for every threat surface or endpoint. Senior security leaders, including CISOs, are taking a more integrated approach to endpoint security by designing in persistence to the device level that thwarts breach attempts in real-time. Absolute is working to change this relationship, allowing remote, disconnected endpoints to remain resilient.
  • Enterprises who are cybersecurity leaders most value a device’s built-in security features when evaluating PCs, laptops, and mobile devices while followers value this feature least. 33% of enterprises who are leaders prioritize devices that have built-in security capabilities that immediately provide persistent connections across the network, enabling greater resiliency. The study also makes the point that endpoint security needs to be tamper-proof at the operating system level, yet be flexible enough to provide IT and cybersecurity teams with device visibility and access to modify protections. One of the leaders in this area, Absolute, has invented endpoint security technology that begins at the BIOS level. There are currently 500M devices that have their endpoint code embedded in them. The Absolute Platform is comprised of three products: Persistence, Intelligence, and Resilience—each building on the capabilities of the other. The following graphic from the IDC study illustrates the stark contrast between enterprises who are cybersecurity leaders versus followers when it comes to adopting build-in security capabilities to harden endpoints across their networks.

Conclusion

When 70% of all breaches originate at endpoints, despite enterprise IT spending more than ever in cybersecurity, it’s a clear sign that endpoint security needs to be an integral part of any cybersecurity strategy. On average, every endpoint has ten security agents installed, often leading to software conflicts and frequent endpoint encryption failures. Absolute’s latest study found that over 42% of endpoints experience encryption failures, leaving entire networks at risk from a breach. They’re most commonly disabled by users, malfunction, or have error conditions or have never been installed correctly in the first place. Absolute also found that endpoints often failed due to the fragile nature of their encryption agents’ configurations. 2% of encryption agents fail every week, and over half of all encryption failures occurred within two weeks, fueling a constant 8% rate of decay every 30 days. 100% of all devices experiencing encryption failures within one year. Multiple endpoint security solutions conflict with each other and create more opportunities for breaches than avert them. These are just a few of the many factors that make improving endpoint security a top goal all enterprises need to achieve in 2020.

Nov 4

5 Strategies Healthcare Providers Are Using To Secure Networks

5 Strategies Healthcare Providers Are Using To Secure Networks

  • Healthcare records are bestsellers on the Dark Web, ranging in price from $250 to over $1,000 per record.
  • The growing, profitable market for Protected Health Information (PHI) is attracting sophisticated cybercriminal syndicates, several of which are state-sponsored.
  •  Medical fraud is slower to detect and notify, unlike financial fraud (ex. stolen credit cards), contributing to its popularity with cybercriminals globally.
  • Cybercriminals prefer PHI data because it’s easy to sell and contains information that is harder to cancel or secure once stolen. Examples include insurance policy numbers, medical diagnoses, Social Security Numbers (SSNs), credit card, checking and savings account numbers.

These and many other insights into why healthcare provider networks are facing a cybersecurity crisis are from the recently declassified U.S. Department of Health & Human Services HC3 Intelligence Briefing Update Dark Web PHI (Protected Health Information) Marketplace presented April 11th of this year. You can download a copy of the slides here (PDF, 13 pp, no opt-in). The briefing provides a glimpse into how the dark web values the “freshness’ of healthcare data and the ease of obtaining elderly patient records, skewing stolen identities to children, and elderly patients. Protenus found that the single largest healthcare breach this year involves 20 million patent records stolen from a medical collections agency. The breach was discovered after the records were found for sale on the dark web. Please see their 2019 Mid-Year Breach Barometer Report (opt-in required) for an analysis of 240 of the reported 285 breach incidents affecting 31,611,235 patient records in the first six months of this year. Cybercriminals capitalize on medical records to drive one or more of the following strategies as defined by the HC3 Intelligence Briefing:

Stopping A Breach Can Avert A HIPAA Meltdown

To stay in business, healthcare providers need to stay in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). HIPAA provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information. Staying in compliance with HIPAA can be a challenge given how mobile healthcare provider workforces are, and the variety of mobile devices they use to complete tasks today. 33% of healthcare employees are working outside of the office at least once a week. And with government incentives for decentralized care expected to expand mobile workforces industry-wide, this figure is expected to increase significantly. Health & Human Services provides a Breach Portal that lists all cases under investigation today. The Portal reflects the severity of healthcare providers’ cybersecurity crisis. Over 39 million medical records have been compromised this year alone, according to HHS’ records from over 340 different healthcare providers. Factoring in the costs of HIPAA fines that can range from $25,000 to $15.M per year, it’s clear that healthcare providers need to have endpoint security on their roadmaps now to avert the high costs of HIPAA non-compliance fines.

Securing endpoints across their healthcare provider networks is one of the most challenging ongoing initiatives any Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for a healthcare provider has today. 39% of healthcare security incidents are caused by stolen or misplaced endpoints. CISOs are balancing the need their workforces have for greater device agility with the need for stronger endpoint security. CISOs are solving this paradox by taking an adaptive approach to endpoint security that capitalizes on strong asset management. “Keeping machines up to date is an IT management job, but it’s a security outcome. Knowing what devices should be on my network is an IT management problem, but it has a security outcome. And knowing what’s going on and what processes are running and what are consuming network bandwidth is an IT management problem, but it’s a security outcome “, said Nicko van Someren, Ph.D. and Chief Technology Officer at Absolute Software.

5 Strategies for Healthcare Providers Are Using To Secure Networks

Thwarting breaches to protect patients’ valuable personal health information starts with an adaptive, strong endpoint strategy. The following are five proven strategies for protecting endpoints, assuring HIPAA compliance in the process:

  1. Implementing an adaptive IT asset management program delivers endpoint security at scale. Healthcare providers prioritizing IT asset management control and visibility can better protect every endpoint on their network. Advanced features including real-time asset management to locate and secure devices, geolocation fencing so devices can only be used in a specific area and device freeze options are very effective for securing endpoints. Healthcare providers are relying more and more on remote data delete as well. The purpose of this feature is to wipe lost or stolen devices within seconds.
  2.  Improve security and IT operations with faster discovery and remediation across all endpoints. Implement strategies that enable greater remediation and resilience of every endpoint. Healthcare providers are having success with this strategy, relying on IT asset management to scale remediation and resilience to every endpoint device. Absolute’s Persistence technology is a leader in this area by providing scalable, secure endpoint resiliency. Absolute also has a proven track record of providing self-healing endpoints extending their patented firmware-embedded Persistence technology that can self-heal applications on compatible endpoint devices.
  3. Design in HIPAA & HITECH compliance and reporting to each endpoint from the first pilot. Any endpoint security strategy needs to build in ongoing compliance checks and automated reports that are audit-ready. It also needs to be able to probe for violations across all endpoints. Advanced endpoint security platforms are capable of validating patient data integrity with self-healing endpoint security. All of these factors add up to reduce time to prepare audits with ongoing compliance checks across your endpoint population.
  4. A layered security strategy that includes real-time endpoint orchestration needs to anchor any healthcare network merger or acquisition, ensuring patient data continues to be protected. Private Equity (PE) firms continue acquiring providers to create healthcare networks that open up new markets. The best breach prevention, especially in merged or acquired healthcare networks, is a comprehensive layered defense strategy that spans endpoints and networks. If one of the layers fails, there are other layers in place to ensure your organization remains protected. Healthcare providers’ success with layered security models is predicated on how successful they are achieving endpoint resiliency. Absolute’s technology is embedded in the core of laptops and other devices at the factory. Once activated, it provides healthcare providers with a reliable two-way connection so they can manage mobility, investigate potential threats, and take action if a security incident occurs.
  5. Endpoint security needs to be tamper-proof at the operating system level on the device yet still provides IT and cybersecurity teams with device visibility and access to modify protections. Healthcare providers need an endpoint visibility and control platform that provides a persistent, self-healing connection between IT, security teams, and every device, whether it is active on the network or not. Every identity is a new security perimeter. Healthcare providers’ endpoint platforms need to be able to secure all devices across different platforms, automate endpoint hygiene, speed incident detection, remediation, and reduce IT asset loss by being able to self-diagnose and repair endpoint devices on real-time.