McAfee: Changing Business Models Create Endpoint Security Gaps
…center or a managed partner that may be managing that security on your behalf. So it’s making sure you have detect, protect and correct, and the ability to remediate and fix anything that you’re seeing in the environment in real time.
From the mistakes perspective, probably the biggest piece is there are cases that customers are not fully utilizing the capabilities of the products that are available. A lot of that is just there’s been a lot of innovation and new capabilities on the endpoint, especially from the endpoint detection and response perspective. There’s a lot more visibility to what’s going on on endpoint than ever before, and the maturity of being able to leverage that is something we see, a lot of customers maturing from that perspective of really fully utilizing the capabilities that they do have available to them.
CF: Does endpoint security pose an increasing challenge for the cybersecurity channel?
NJ: I think the bigger challenge is as we start to really increase our visibility to the threats and the tactics, and understanding of those, the ability to detect those, that’s where the challenge comes in in terms of having the right expertise to understand what you’re seeing and to be able to detect that something needs further investigation. And there’s a lot of elements that we’re seeing coming to market to further help there because the channel side of this is obviously they’re not going to have the people or resources to scale and apply human effort to all of this. So one of the items that’s evolving to help the channel deal with this is a lot more automation-guided investigation … helping people walk through this side of understanding what’s happening on the endpoints and detecting the threats, and being able to take effective and fast remediation steps to improve the overall security posture in those environments.
CF: Looking ahead, do you see any growing trends in endpoint threats?
NJ: The key trend that they’re going to have to keep aware of is historically the bulk of the threats and attacks have been more in the end user-PC landscape, and as we’ve built up a series of technologies and capabilities in this full threat life cycle approach, we’ve made it harder to attack the primary piece where they’ve been able to enter into the enterprises. And as you harden one area, you will eventually see more investment in the attackers into other platforms and technologies. Mobile devices and IoT devices, especially as that starts to further proliferate, are probably two of the fastest-growing areas of the endpoint attack surface that enterprises need to pay attention to.