Turns out, criminals are opportunists. Who knew?
Okay, none of us should be surprised that cyber crooks were happy to step over the sick and dying during a pandemic to cash in on the work-from-home chaos that came with it. They are, after all, criminals.
But the widespread success of their efforts has been, in a word, astounding. As the world reels from one cyber breach or ransomware event to the next, two factors promise a long and drawn-out battle between the forces of (cyber)good and (cyber) evil:
1. Cyber crooks have cracked the people code and are now as successful at penetrating organizations through human weaknesses as they are at exploiting software and hardware vulnerabilities.
2. People aren’t giving up the benefits of tech-enabled remote work, having gained more than 20 hours a month of personal time previously lost commuting on average 27.6 minutes each way, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
This all means that your clients embracing hybrid work will face ongoing risks from the simultaneous proliferation of endpoints and the cyberthreats that target them. In other words, you need to arm them with an endpoint protection platform (EPP) that’s up to the challenge.
What’s The Right EPP Platform For Your Clients?
Matching your clients to an endpoint security solution means finding the right fit for you and your clients alike. Features to screen for include:
- Easy deployment - Look for a solution that installs quickly and easily and plays nice with other security software that’s already been installed.
- Easily, lightweight operation - Your endpoint solution should go easy on human and system resources. The best solutions, though entirely configurable by you or your client, run largely autonomously. Updates, infection alerts and remediations should all be automated. Make sure your solution’s been independently tested and benchmarked for CPU and RAM consumption against its competitors.
- Online and offline protection - Your solution should contain infections and protect vital system and user data even when an endpoint is offline.
- Simple, fully remote endpoint management - Since remote work is part of your clients’ models, the EPP solution you source should be fully manageable remotely by you or your clients. And it should be easy to manage preferences like whitelists, blacklists, heuristics and more.
- Simple management tools - Your tools are only as powerful as they are easy to manage. Set your clients up with a system with a cloud-based console for them and integrations to tools like remote monitoring and management, professional services automation and business intelligence for you.
- Real-time threat intelligence and updates - It’s not just a scary world out there; it’s dynamically scary. New threats emerge constantly. Updates should be automated and immediate.
- Comprehensive malware detection - Your clients need protection against all known threats, not just some of them. That means viruses, trojans, phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks, ransomware, spyware, browser-based attacks, cryptojacking, credential theft, script-based attacks, file-less attacks, domain spoofing—the works.
- Malicious script protection - Evasive scripts can defeat most anti-malware solutions. The solution source should detect, block and neutralize the full spectrum of script attacks.
- User identity and privacy protection - Advanced EPP solutions offer protection from DNS poisoning, keylogging, screen and clipboard grabbing, cookie scraping browser and session hijacking and more.
- More than EPP - Partner with a firm that delivers a suite of cyber resilience services to cover the risk that no EPP can neutralize on its own.
What’s The Right EPP For Your MSP Business?
MSP success hinges upon access to firms that know how to take care of channel partners and their customers. That means a provider with a proven commitment to the channel and sufficient size to scale with your MSP as it grows.