You know this better than anyone: It takes a lot of work to succeed as a small or medium-sized business (SMB). Every day, you consider factors like hiring and retaining employees, marketing your products and services, scaling your business, and navigating uncertain economic climates. 

Increasingly, another consideration is protecting your SMB from the growing threat of a damaging cyberattack. SMBs are three times more likely to be targeted by hackers compared to larger companies and 95% of breaches are attributed to human error. Often, hackers are breaching your system through your vulnerable endpoints, like laptops and mobile phones. It’s a tricky balancing act: you need your employees and partners to remain productive from various locations and devices, but more than half of these devices also harbor sophisticated, persistent, and evasive hidden threats.

It's not a new phenomenon. In fact, we’ve seen novel endpoint breaches for years, including a 2018 intrusion against a casino in which attackers gained access to the network via a smart thermometer in the casino’s aquarium!

You may not have an office fish tank, but you certainly have a treasure trove of other endpoint devices. The best defense is a strong Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution. EDR will not only help your SMB prevent an endpoint intrusion in the first place but also actively respond to a threat while it is happening. 

The Role of EDR in Proactive Threat Detection 

Let’s start with a quick survey. Does your SMB use any of the following endpoints? 

• Mobile devices

• Desktop computers

• Company laptops

• Virtual machines

• Embedded devices like routers and switches

• Servers

These devices are critical to your operations. But they also put you at risk. Mobile devices and company laptops are easily lost or stolen. Desktop computers and virtual machines are frequently infected with malware. Embedded devices and servers are often overlooked and lack the proper security. And, on top of all this, the human element (your employees and partners) is notorious for poor password practices, which adds to your overall vulnerability. 

Obviously, you can’t do without these devices. But you can build a stronger and more proactive security perimeter for your endpoints with Endpoint Detection and Response. EDR goes beyond traditional antivirus solutions to create resilient endpoints that actually act as your first line of defense against a cyberattack. The right EDR solution offers proactive and continuous monitoring for suspicious activity and integrated threat detection, regardless of the attack vector. 

If an endpoint intrusion does occur, EDR minimizes the damage by isolating the endpoint to prevent further communication to other devices on your network. Without EDR, an intrusion can lead to productivity loss. Even if you re-image the device, you can still lose time, data, and money. The best EDR solutions allow your SMB to essentially “wind back the clock” to restore files, return to a healthy state, and keep your business safely humming along. 

The Importance of Real-Time Incident Response

When a cybersecurity incident occurs, timing is everything. Your SMB must be able to actively respond to a threat not after an intrusion, but while it is happening. A breach will be a stressful situation. It’s natural for your team to feel paralyzed while the threat propagates. Endpoint Detection and Response enables your team to shake the paralysis and take immediate action across all endpoints. We mentioned the human element above—EDR is also an intuitive solution that doesn’t require a steep learning curve for your team. The best solutions are effective yet simple, so security professionals of all abilities can easily deploy and manage it. 

When remediation is required, a single, unified agent eliminates the complexity and costs associated with deploying multiple solutions, along with system conflicts that negatively impact performance. The right EDR solution doesn’t sacrifice endpoint performance, enabling your SMB to go from infection to recovery in seconds to ensure continual operations and minimize potential damages. 

Endpoint Detection and Response is a critical component of your overall security posture. EDR has myriad benefits: it positions your endpoints as your first line of defense, offers muti-layered protection to catch threats, and provides the intelligence required to investigate, isolate, and remediate an endpoint intrusion. It also saves your SMB time and money by eliminating costly and clunky console hardware, software, and database management activities. EDR protects all of your devices—even that office fish tank!

At N8 Solutions, we’re excited to partner with Malwarebytes, a leader in cybersecurity and anti-malware software, to offer a best-in-class Endpoint Detection and Response solution. Every day, Malwarebytes finds and remediates 3 million infections. Our unique telemetry provides insight into real-life threats “in the wild” and how to best counter them. Please get in touch with us today to learn more and see if our EDR solution is right for you.