The Role of EPP in Cybersecurity

As more endpoint security technologies come together, it sometimes feels tricky to differentiate these two categories: endpoint protection platforms (EPP) and endpoint detection and response solutions (EDR).

There’s often a confusion about each tool’s role in strengthening an organization’s cybersecurity strategy. Some people wonder which one should they prioritize — an EPP or an EDR?

They also get bombarded with questions like, “What features should you look for in each tool?” “How do you stop emerging attacks?” And “What is the most effective for incident response?”

Let us take a closer look at EDR, EPP, and their role in cybersecurity to answer these questions.

EPP Cybersecurity: Keeps You Safe From Common Threats

EPP focuses on attack prevention, especially those commodity threats which include malware, non-targeted phishing, and basic scams. Commodity threats are still a top focus for many businesses, despite the fact that they are well known. It’s because of their huge volume and ability to interrupt activities.

For example, widespread ransomware infection could bring your organization to a halt. You also don’t want to pressur your IT staff with requests for malware eradication or complete device remediation for work laptops.

Most IT security teams are able to address these threats effectively as long as they are equipped with the right tools like EPP. It can block traditional threats and protect you from advanced attacks .

Hackers need to work harder as a result of good preventive security, which tends to raise cost structures. As a result, opportunistic aggressors will most likely forsake you as a target and move on to less secure prey. EPP can also improve the efficiency of your detection and response operations by mitigating alerts, which reduces the effort of your IT security personnel.

Despite the fact that we’re discussing endpoint protection here, you should remember that endpoint itself doesn’t cover everything. If you want to prevent threats and collect data for forensic purposes, it would be ideal to have a great network protection suite that works well with your EPP. After all, it can be hard to handle security incidents when you lack data or can’t correlate it.

Some of the basic functionalities of EPP cybersecurity when it comes to prevention and incident response include:

• Extensive malware detection
• Blocks common exploits
• Detects and stops code injection
• Integrates with a host-based firewall
• Inspection of browser data
• Whitelisting

EDR Cybersecurity: Takes Care of Attacks that Got Past Your EPP

While endpoint protection platforms perform so well in terms of threat prevention, they are not ready to combat post-compromise security issues. For instance, if an attacker bypasses your firewall and EPP, you cannot detect it without using another tool.

This is where endpoint detection and reaction comes into the picture. This solution enables your IT security teams to spot harmful activities in the midst of typical user behavior. This is accomplished by gathering behavioral information and transferring it to a central database for analysis. EDR solutions find patterns and detect anomalies using AI-driven analytics technologies.

EDR is very much treasured in the modern threat environment, as organizations encounter more targeted attacks that traditional security measures can’t handle. It combines threat detection and incident response, and offer the following capabilities:

• Recognizing harmful activities, such as registry key changes and process starts.
• Putting detections into context and visualizing the attack with all of the affected hosts
• Threat intelligence about the current threat landscape
• Proactive response
• Isolates all impacted hosts from the network to stop attacks.

Operators that are familiar with basic attack tactics and can respond to threats immediately are hard to come by. That said, many industry experts may lack qualified workers in the near future.

In dealing with these types of competency issues, automation and outsourced assistance can be valuable. Comodo EDR was built with this in mind, giving you automated response steps as well as the ability to escalate challenging matters to our experts.

Final Thoughts

Companies can protect their networks by deploying both EPP and EDR solutions. Doing this can guarantee that you will have a sufficient security posture against modern cyber threats. Depending on your company’s needs, one can be prioritized over the other, but in today’s security landscape, both good prevention and response are required.

Which is more critical for your business: the ability to stop attacks at the endpoint or the ability to identify them promptly once they’ve gotten past your preventative defenses? This is an important question and your response should consider your industry, network structure, organizational culture, and security team’s capabilities.

Contact Comodo today to find out more about our cybersecurity offerings.