Cybersecurity Awareness Series: Enterprise Security Controls

This series is meant to empower organizations with key indicators on the current state of cybersecurity. As the only security provider embedded in the firmware of more than 600 million devices, Absolute’s unique position enables a more complete picture – and a single-source-of-truth intelligence to empower IT and security teams to eliminate potential blind spots and minimize risk exposure.  

Leveraging millions of anonymized data points adapted from a global customer base, this series will feature insights into device and application health, device mobility, sensitive data exposure, and more – with detailed views by vertical, region, and organization size.  

Failing security controls are potential attack vectors

Part 1 of this Cybersecurity Awareness series focused on the increasing number of vulnerabilities affecting corporate devices. Part 2 showcased the less obvious but just as risky factors that increase the potential attack surface for organizations, including sensitive data storage and the increased mobility of the workforce.

The third and final post of this series will dive into the enterprise security controls that organizations implement today to protect against these risks. There are many types of software that are leveraged together to ensure the most effective security posture for organizations. They include technologies such as Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). While well-meaning, if these applications go unmonitored on endpoints, they can easily degrade and become compromised.

Is application health truly an issue?

Application health can be affected by many things, whether it be as innocent as a lack of updating or as devious as malicious compromise. To gauge just how healthy today’s applications are, Absolute monitored the application health of six security applications over a period of two weeks:

The analysis shows that these six apps are working effectively on less than 80% of devices in most cases and in some as low as 35%. For IT and security teams this is completely unacceptable given the existing increased risks at play in today’s work-from-anywhere world.

These applications are security controls put in place to ensure the safety and protection of data and information flowing across the organization. If they don’t work as intended, a single endpoint can become a means of infiltration for bad actors. One “chink” in the proverbial armor of the security stack can become catastrophic for any organization.

What can be done about it?

Absolute Application Resilience™ continuously measures the effectiveness of security controls and enables them to automatically repair or reinstall themselves if they stop working for any reason.

To test the efficacy of this technology, those same six applications were monitored (over the same timeframe), with Absolute’s resilient, self-healing capabilities enabled. The result? More than 95% of devices reported healthy security applications – as much as 60% higher
than those without.

This makes it abundantly clear that to deliver both maximum protection and returns on security investments, endpoint agents must be continuously monitored and maintained.

To learn more about how Absolute can protect your organization’s application health in today’s work-from-anywhere world, schedule a demo with one of our experts.