Endpoint Resilience a ‘Critical Capability’ for Remote Work

Is your organization contributing to redefining the future of work? If so, you’re not alone. It’s become a common theme across organizations today and, like many others, Absolute is also reevaluating company policies, procedures, and technologies to accommodate a growing hybrid workforce. As you further prioritize your digital transformation efforts to this end, it’s important that you don’t forget one critical capability necessary for successful remote work – endpoint resilience.

With endpoint devices distributed far and wide and in the hands of your employees who now, in part, work from anywhere, organizations can no longer solely rely on network and perimeter-based security controls. Resilient endpoints — or those you have visibility and control over no matter where they reside — is increasingly important for the protection of your data, applications, devices, and even your employees from today’s cybersecurity threats.

The need to maintain visibility and control over remote endpoints calls for a trusted, secure connection to each device. You can’t secure what you can’t see, after all. With a permanent digital tether to each device, you can significantly increase your endpoint resiliency because IT and Security teams can ensure critical security controls are installed, working as intended, and are up to date no matter where they are, all in an automated way.

Also read: 3 Imperatives for Securing your Hybrid Workforce

Benefits of Endpoint Resiliency

Endpoint Resiliency is the topic of a new research report from Forrester, commissioned by Absolute, entitled Take a Proactive Approach to Endpoint Security. In it, Forrester reveals endpoint resilience as a ‘critical capability’ being adopted for remote work, evidenced by the 66 percent of security leader respondents who say securing modern business environments requires proactive endpoint resiliency.

As the world migrates to more work-from-anywhere environments, it’s no longer an option to deprioritize the risks associated with endpoint devices. All too often, they serve as the beachhead hackers use to launch their attacks in the goal of gaining your data. In response, security leaders rank their top 3 areas of focus for the coming year as:

1. Automating the protection of sensitive or at-risk data (60%)
2. Geolocation (52%)
3. Security control health (48%)

While endpoint resilience is a critical capability for protecting against security challenges, it also supports investment ROI. Just 38 percent of security respondents in this survey said they were able to measure the effectiveness of their security spend. Without visibility into the health and function of the security controls installed on their endpoints, there’s little evidence to support future investment decisions. As a distributed workforce becomes increasingly common for the enterprise, cybersecurity spending must be carefully managed so that your organization has what it needs. No more or no less.

The world of work will continue to evolve long after the global health pandemic has been beaten. Successful organizations will navigate the change with insight and agility. Endpoint resilience offers both.

We’ve seen change – lots of change – over the last year, and more is inevitably coming. We hope this report will inform you as you continue to define endpoint protection in your Hybrid Work strategy. Please download the whitepaper, Take a Proactive Approach to Endpoint Security from Forrester. For more on how Absolute provides an undeletable tether to endpoints and grants self-healing to mission critical applications, go to Absolute Resilience™.