What is an Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)?

Endpoint security is now more important than ever as ransomware attacks are targeting the endpoint, encrypting its files and demanding a ransom to restore access to them. The transition to remote work driven by COVID-19 has also increased endpoints’ exposure to cyber threats and made them an organization’s first line of defense.

Organizations need to develop and implement a comprehensive endpoint security strategy capable of addressing the modern cybersecurity risks that endpoints face. And deploying an endpoint protection platform (EPP) is a crucial component of this strategy.

What is EPP and Why Is It Essential to Have It?

An EPP solution, acting as a preventative first line of defense against cyber threats to the endpoint, identifies file-based and fileless malware, malicious scripts, and malware that operates only in memory, and blocks these threats from executing on a system.

As malware becomes more sophisticated and widespread, having the threat investigation and remediation capabilities provided by EPP is essential to corporate cybersecurity. Security teams require a solution that blocks many of the threats that their endpoints face and provides them with the tools to effectively remediate any successful intrusions.

Core Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) Features

An EPP solution should provide comprehensive protection to an organization’s endpoints. To accomplish this, an EPP solution must offer certain core functionality.

• Prevention of All Emerging Threats
  The cyber threat landscape is rapidly evolving, and new malware variants are created each day to take advantage of new platforms and newly discovered vulnerabilities. Additionally, many of these variants use various sophisticated techniques to help evade traditional anti-malware defenses.

With such a quickly changing threat landscape, legacy approaches to endpoint defense – based upon malware detection using signatures – is no longer effective. An EPP solution should provide protection against novel and evolving threats rather than being limited to detecting and blocking known malware variants.

• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
  EPP is designed to prevent threats to endpoints, acting as the first line of defense against cyber threats. However, this prevention-focused approach may not catch every potential threat.

For this reason, EPP should be paired with an EDR solution. EDR solutions are designed to support threat detection and perform threat hunting on an endpoint. A solution that combines both preventative EPP and proactive EDR provides full-spectrum support for identifying and addressing cyberattacks against the endpoint.

• Integrations
  Endpoints are only part of an organization’s IT infrastructure. Effective protection against cyber threats requires the ability to perform coordinated response to cyberattacks targeting multiple endpoints across the corporate network. An EPP solution needs to have the ability to easily integrate with other corporate cybersecurity solutions to enable threat intelligence sharing and coordinated, automated responses to cyber threats.

• Protection Wherever Data Resides
  Corporate networks consist of a variety of different endpoints. While many user workstations are running Windows or macOS, an organization also likely has Linux-based servers. As remote work becomes more common and virtualization technology improves, the use of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has become more common as well.

An EPP solution should be capable of providing consistent protection to all of an organization’s endpoints. This includes support for all operating systems and the ability to efficiently monitor and protect VDI-based systems as well.

EPP Evolution: What’s next?

Many organizations are reliant upon an array of standalone solutions for their cybersecurity. This approach to security results in additional complexity and work for security analysts who need to manually aggregate data across platforms and learn to work with many different dashboards. As a result, overwhelmed security personnel miss alerts regarding actual threats.

As organizations seek to consolidate their security infrastructure, EPP provides the ability to simplify and improve endpoint protection. Its broad portfolio of capabilities enables an organization to achieve the same level of protection with a single solution as with many standalone systems.

Additionally, cloud-based EPP offerings enable an organization to consolidate security across on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure, which is essential for securing growing cloud deployments. These solutions offer full-features threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities in a form factor that scales to meet organizations’ expanding security needs.

Securing the Endpoint with Check Point

Check Point’s Check Point Endpoint Security is a complete endpoint security solution built to protect the remote workforce from today’s complex threat landscape. It prevents the most imminent threats to the endpoint such as ransomware, phishing or drive-by malware, while quickly minimizing breach impact with autonomous detection and response.

This way, your organization gets all the endpoint protection it needs, at the quality it deserves, in a single, efficient, and cost-effective solution

Check Point Endpoint Security has a full-featured EPP solution offering:

• Prevention-First Approach
• EDR and Threat Hunting
• Support for All OS’s and VDI

To learn more about how Check Point Endpoint Security is revolutionizing endpoint security, check out this product tour. OR, you can learn how Check Point Endpoint Security can solve your organization’s unique endpoint security challenges with a personalized live demonstration. Then, you might want to try Check Point Endpoint Security out for yourself with a free trial.