How Can NGAV and EDR Protect Your Business?

In the last two years, more businesses have been shifting to a remote or hybrid work setup. This change has made companies more vulnerable to cyber-attacks such as ransomware. In fact, McAfee reports that global cybercrime losses have surpassed $1 trillion!

87% of business owners report that improving cybersecurity is a top priority for their organizations in the next two years. At the same time, the evolving nature of these attacks has rendered traditional methods of protecting businesses ineffective.

The best way for companies to effectively upgrade their defenses and maximize their security is next-generation antivirus (NGAV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR).

Read on to learn more about NGAV and EDR, and how together they can successfully protect your business from cyber threats.

What is NGAV?

As older AV software is becoming increasingly outdated due to its inability to spot newer file-less zero-day vulnerabilities, NGAV has become a central part of every effective cybersecurity plan in recent years.

NGAV utilizes predictive analysis driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning to gain an understanding of what normal network behaviour looks like. This gives it the ability to spot any unusual activity patterns and proactively block suspicious activities before they have a chance to enter the network.

Though NGAV has several advantages over traditional antivirus software, it is limited by its capacity to solely look at specific attributes associated with potential threats. This means it is unable to offer true behavioural analysis.

Another challenge is that NGAV can only focus on the information compiled from one device at any time. It cannot view the full scale of the attack campaign across multiple devices and the entire network, leaving the majority of the system open and vulnerable.

Additionally, NGAV is the best antivirus for preventing attacks. However, if an attack slips through the defences, NGAV will not be able to offer any insight on what happened or where the threat is. This is becoming a pressing concern as more and more advanced attacks use legitimate means like employee logins to make their way onto the network.

Remember, prevention is only a part of the cybersecurity puzzle. Companies need technology that fills in the gaps left by NGAV. This way, businesses will be able to detect and rectify malware that made it past NGAV’s defences.

Fortunately for us, this is where EDR comes in!

What Is EDR?

Unlike NGAV, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools monitor all of a network’s endpoints in real-time, collecting and analyzing a wealth of activity data to identify threat patterns. As this is all done from a centralized location, EDR is extremely valuable to businesses where their operations are spread out across the globe.

EDR consolidates information about activities and events taking place on all endpoints and workloads. It gives security teams a complete picture of the network’s activities and catches issues that may have escaped initial defenses. This allows companies to deal with security breaches before they become a problem.

EDR security solutions provide continuous, comprehensive, and real-time insights into what is happening on endpoints. They are also effective tools of threat detection, incident data search and investigation alert triage, suspicious activity validation, threat hunting, and malicious activity detection and containment.

Clearly, EDR and NGAV are the perfect pairing when it comes to ensuring your business’s cybersecurity.

The Ultimate Defence Team—NGAV and EDR!

Whether it is overpowering attackers who use malware that’s been around for a while or advanced techniques like file-less malware, it is becoming increasingly clear that utilizing just antivirus is no longer enough to protect your business.

Moreover, it is also not a case of NGAV vs. EDR. In contrast, these two solutions work best when they are integrated as part of a single holistic defence solution. As attackers treat all of a business’s machines as possible entry points, these two technologies provide the ideal defence for the entire organization as they complement each other and make up for each other’s limitations.

While organizations need to actively detect advanced threats and stop malware from entering their networks, they also need a plan to immediately respond to threats that get past their defences. Technology that combines NGAV with EDR can effectively carry out both tasks.

As NGAV solely focuses on preventing attacks, it is rendered useless when a threat manages to sneak past its defences. On the other hand, EDR technology takes a proactive approach to network security. By monitoring endpoints in real-time, it not only actively hunts malware that made it past the NGAV defences but also offers a better understanding of the attack and the mechanisms for immediately remedying it.

In conclusion, adding EDR to NGAV makes room for behavioural-based threat detection, which is a superior and more nuanced way of detecting malicious operations. This is because, unlike attributes, behaviours are so much more complicated and expensive for attackers to change.

How Can ManageSecure SGN Help You?

At ManagePoint Technologies, your organization’s security will always be our top priority. Our ManageSecure SGN is an easy-to-use security cloud platform that provides small-to-medium-sized businesses with enterprise-class security and networking solutions.

With ManageSecure SGN, you get access to Next-Gen cloud firewall, EDR, Cloud VPN, ZeroTrust, and more to effectively protect your entire network from malicious cyberattacks. It is the most effective cybersecurity solution for organizations utilizing a remote or hybrid work model.

A VPN tunnel will link your business to ManageSecure SGN’s offerings, which include web proxy, firewall, content filtering, intrusion detection and prevention, malware interception and security information and event management (SIEM) technologies.

From proper onboarding and deployment to 24/7 monitoring and enhanced analysis, ManagePoint Technologies team will provide your business with a robust cybersecurity protection system. Contact us immediately if you want to improve your data security and hybrid workforce operations for your business regardless of its size. You can reach out to us by visiting our website, sending an email to [email protected], or calling (877)262-3620.