What Is Unified Endpoint Security (UES)?

If we are talking about a modern business environment, the endpoints of your company’s network are getting more and more varied and numerous. The goal is to keep them all safe, in the meantime preserving the mobility and comfort of employees and being up to date with the latest wireless gadget, let’s say.

Sure, you can find a security solution for each one of them – smartphones, tablets, PCs, BYODs, and so on. But have you considered the office smart appliances (they are counting as endpoints too if they are connected to your network)? Are all these solutions working together? Are they working for you and not burden you with extra work? And how can you be sure that they cover the ever-expanding attack surface, every port?

Unified Endpoint Security (UES) can be a solution for your cybersecurity plan, enabling you to have complete visibility of your endpoints and unified, easy-to-use, protection.

Definition of Unified Endpoint Security

Unified Endpoint Security (UES) combines the features of Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) in one single platform.

This will simplify the way that endpoint security tools work together, being integrated from the beginning into one centralized solution that can offer a global view.

The goal is to increase productivity and efficiency and enable organizations to secure endpoints on their networks, while also detecting and remediating threats on all endpoints quickly and effectively.

UES solution is one integrated toolset that protects devices, apps, networks, and employees.

Unified Endpoint Security Features

An ideal secured network should not have any loopholes for cybercriminals to get in. This ideal is impossible to reach manually on a modern business network that has numerous endpoints to watch and secure.

The three components of UES – EPP, EDR, and MTD – are harmoniously working together, but let’s see how:

• Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) – This is basically a shelter for your devices, and it is intended to safeguard endpoints by preventing threats from entering your environment.
• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) – This component focuses on detecting, evaluating, and responding to threats that have managed to breach the system. While EPP focuses on preventing and blocking malicious attacks, EDR hunts them down in your endpoints’ environment.
• Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) – This component works by blocking, recognizing, and remediating cybersecurity threats specific to mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets), as well as applications and networks.

As you already figured out, this gives Unified Endpoint Security solutions a nice handful of features that should cover every possible endpoint in a smart, efficient way.

UES features include:

• Application control through machine learning: whitelisting or blacklisting applications, or even sandboxing them.
• Data protection through data encryption or web traffic encryption, controlling users’ access and storage for sensitive information, also implementing password management.
• Managing updates and patches to all endpoints (including the mobile ones).
• Having firewall abilities (directing traffic through specific ports) and antivirus abilities (preventing file-based malware, detecting and blocking malicious activity, and providing incident investigation and remediation features).
• Collecting data by continuously monitoring all files and applications entering a device or network.
• Analyzing data in real-time to find suspicious activities or threats, and recognize threat patterns and trends for future malware.
• Detection capabilities on more sophisticated malware like zero-day attacks, fileless malware, some types of ransomware, or polymorphic malware.
• Blocking threats like suspect downloads and websites, or phishing emails.
• Responding to threats by alerting the security team or mitigating them automatically. An automated response can be configurated so the security suite will block known threats without human assistance.
• Assisting in forensics by investigating post-attack data.
• Real-time scanning of mobile devices, apps, and networks for vulnerabilities like malware or suspicious activities.

Unified Endpoint Security (UES) Vs. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)

As you can see, the two concepts are differentiated by one word, but what difference a word can make!

As their names do, the two overlap on many points, but while UEM focuses on centralized enterprise endpoint management, UES takes this a step further by preventing, identifying, and responding to threats on endpoint devices.

Unified Endpoint Security can be layered on top of Unified Endpoint Management providing you not only a unified management toolset but also a strong security agent.

Going a little bit deeper with this comparison, UEM can include:

• Patching management features
• Better and faster security communication in an organization
• Mobile device management
• A base to build cybersecurity layers on

While UES detects and hunts threats, protecting endpoints and networks from them, UEM unifies, clarifies, and solidifies an organization’s overall safety posture and daily threat prevention.

Why Unified Endpoint Security Matters for Your Business

Through this article, we stressed the security benefits that UES can bring to your business – from gaining visibility on your endpoints, to better protection against modern threats and a strong response in case malware is detected – now is the time to take a look at more logistic-oriented benefits.

Unified Endpoint Security helps you to reach several goals like:

• Reduce your security team workload by having one platform that provides such a large number of tools. Having all that complex security data compiled for them is a timesaver.
• Reduce costs for your business by decreasing the number of platforms and solutions that must be purchased, installed, and managed.
• Detection and response for mobile devices is included in a security solution alongside more traditional devices like laptops and desktops, not built separately.
• Provides remote monitoring, management and response to threats that appear during the new normal: remote work.
• Consolidating all endpoint security components on one single platform makes it more coherent and gap-free.

The ideal Unified Endpoint Security solution accomplishes much more than just endpoint protection. It authenticates people, networks, devices, and apps continuously and contextually.

How Can Heimdal® Help?

All Heimdal endpoint cybersecurity solutions are unified under a single dashboard, but can also be used stand-alone, if needed.

Our endpoint security suite consists of:

Heimdal Threat Prevention is a DNS traffic-filtering solution that makes sure malware doesn’t set foot in your endpoints.

Next-Gen Endpoint Antivirus has four layers of impeccable detection powered by Heimdal™ Security’s unique intelligence, which will help you detect and mitigate even the most complex threats.

Heimdal Patch & Asset Management, its automatic patching, and updating engine keeps all your apps and software up to date, regardless of the machine’s status, time zone, or package size. The updating/patching module also allows your system admin to deploy proprietary software on all the machines.

Heimdal Privileged Access Management, our Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution will help you increase your UA hygiene and take full control of what goes on inside your machine. This is the only PAM solution on the market that automatically de-escalates user rights on threat detection.

Wrapping Up…

Let’s face the music, data security must be ensured regardless of the kind of devices and networks your employee use. And with such a high standard in mind, you need a smart, cost and time-efficient, up-to-date cybersecurity solution.

No wonder the Unified Endpoint Security solution grows in popularity due to its ability to process large amounts of data and its tools that prevent data leaks, data breaches, and insider attacks, among other threats, all this to keep all your endpoints safe.

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