Our post-analysis has uncovered a critical issue: credential leakage is the most prevalent cause of hacker attacks. Hackers exploit these credentials to gain a foothold on users’ endpoint devices, such as desktops, laptops, or mobile devices. These endpoint devices, serving as the primary gateway to enterprise networks, are frequently targeted by attackers for illicit purposes. Alarmingly, a Ponemon survey found that 68% of organizations have experienced at least one successful endpoint attack in the past year, underscoring the urgent need for enhanced endpoint security measures.

This article was first published in the Medium MPP plan. If you are a Medium user, please follow me on Medium. Thank you very much.

On the other hand, IT teams heavily rely on specialized software for endpoint protection. However, endpoint devices, both online and offline, have become the preferred tools for almost all employees in their work. Therefore, endpoint management is a fundamental component of IT teams’ enterprise infrastructure strategy. However, the rapid shift to online work methods, regardless of geographical location, has posed urgent and significant challenges for organizations still relying on more traditional approaches.

When establishing cross-endpoint visibility and security controls, both IT and security teams need to understand that each endpoint should bear some, if not full, responsibility for its own security. Unlike traditional network security approaches, the security measures implemented in this case apply to the entire network rather than just individual devices or servers. Therefore, ensuring resilience in all endpoints is crucial for successfully implementing defense strategies.

The State of Endpoint Management

Organizations should establish a simple form of endpoint management and security management system, such as unified endpoint management, antivirus software, or anti-malware programs, at least across their device clusters. Many organizations go beyond these basic measures and utilize endpoint security encryption technologies, intrusion detection, and behavior-blocking elements to identify and prevent threats or risky behaviors from endpoint users or intruders. However, as the total number of devices in enterprises and the average number of applications installed on these systems rapidly increase, IT and security teams face increasingly complex tasks. Consequently, managers often find that endpoint management consumes excessive time and hinders their focus on other strategic priorities.

At the same time, users expect to have a good and consistent endpoint experience regardless of their location. Their main concern is that their technology works effectively if they have continuous access to the reliable resources they need. This means that when users work remotely, IT teams need higher levels of visibility to ensure consistent experiences across different locations.

Driving Trends for the Future of Endpoint Management

To address these challenges, experts in the industry predict that future cross-endpoint management tools will undergo further simplification and modernization. Three distinct trends explain the specific requirements from the new era of remote work:

• Integration of local endpoint security: More organizations now understand that endpoint security and access security go hand in hand, and establishing resilient zero-trust principles from endpoints to network boundaries is crucial for modern security posture. 51% of organizations have encountered attackers accessing company data by targeting endpoints. Therefore, software-defined boundaries or zero-trust network access (ZTNA) methods no longer rely on contextual factors such as time or geography when granting user access. They also consider device configurations and the security posture of the devices. In the future, most IT and security practitioners will desire a unified endpoint and secure access platform to consolidate visibility and control for addressing risks in cross-endpoint access, applications, and networks.

• Resilient, self-healing, and trusted systems: Ensuring resilience in every endpoint is crucial for successfully implementing defense strategies. Self-healing cybersecurity systems enhance security and IT productivity while simplifying the management and protection of today’s highly distributed infrastructure. Malicious actors often exploit human errors to disable existing security measures on enterprise devices.

  Self-healing solutions can monitor critical applications to counter these threats to prevent tampering or degradation. Automation can be used to repair or reinstall problematic or lost applications. However, different self-healing cybersecurity systems are established in different ways.

  Self-healing can exist at three levels: application, operating system, and firmware. According to Forrester Research, firmware-based tools embedded within devices are the most important, as they ensure the proper functioning of everything on the device (e.g., endpoint agents, VPNs, and various software). This technology remains intact even if administrators reconfigure the endpoint or replace the hard drive. In the future, organizations should prioritize vendors that offer persistent and self-healing capabilities when making final purchasing decisions.

• Focus on consistent user endpoint experience: In addition to IT manageability and core security aspects, organizations must focus on the remote workers themselves, ensuring they have insights and visibility from endpoints to network edges that impact the end-user experience. This includes addressing device issues (e.g., outdated OS systems, disk drive capacity), home office Wi-Fi and network issues, VPN tunnel performance issues, and application-related problems while enabling IT to quickly identify and rectify the root causes. On the other hand, many organizations have shifted to using Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) tools to help identify technical performance issues and adjust application performance to achieve business objectives. In the future, leading endpoint management tools will incorporate the collection of endpoint user experience telemetry and analysis into their products.

Currently, the modernization process of endpoint management strategies is progressing smoothly. Combining the aforementioned trends will provide employees with a better digital experience and help organizations improve operational efficiency while reducing the attack surface.