You and your clients hear a lot about endpoint protection (EPP) these days, and you should. Today’s decentralized, remote-work business models create more exposure points for your customers’ businesses than ever before. And according to IDC, 70 percent of successful attacks start with endpoints. Simply put, it’s not practical to achieve true cyber resilience without addressing endpoint vulnerabilities. That doesn’t just mean protecting endpoints. It means backing them up, as well.

It’s Not Endpoint Protection vs. Backup—It’s Both
Endpoint protection secures devices that connect to a network, like laptops, smartphones and printers. Endpoint backup creates copies of data stored on these devices so that it can be recovered in the event of a ransomware attack or other data-loss incident. Together, endpoint protection and backup provide a more comprehensive approach to cyber resilience, helping to ensure that your customers’ businesses try to avoid endpoint-driven cyber incidents altogether but also can quickly recover if one does occur.

That last part—planning for incident recovery—is part and parcel to cyber resilience. Your clients should deploy the best possible tools and strategies to avoid incidents altogether, but plan for one to happen anyway so their business can continue to function if it does.

This is an important distinction because some of your clients are warming up (or maybe the better term is waking up!) to the ability of endpoint protection to help secure their businesses—especially with work from home (WFH) and work from anywhere (WFA) business models. As a result, endpoints are often overlooked in backup planning. We won’t dig into that too much here but have a blog devoted to just that that you can check out here.

Pitching Endpoint Protection and Backup Solutions

Even though many businesses are waking up to the need for endpoint protection, plenty still need nudging (not that we need to tell you that!). But it’s also vital to tie endpoint backup to those discussions. Without it, your clients can’t achieve true resilience.

Here are some talking points that may help you get those conversations moving in the right direction:

• All of your device connections are points of risk that are being actively targeted by cyber crooks—especially remote connections. In fact, 70 percent of successful attacks start with endpoints.
• If your business is like most companies, you’re not backing up often enough or broadly enough to protect yourself adequately from cyberattacks, employee errors like accidental file and directory deletions or old-fashioned systems failures (things still break!).
• Endpoint backup is essential to quickly recovering from any of those incidents without significant production disruption in your company. It also helps to protect you from ransomware attacks.
• The right endpoint protection and backup solutions are automated, ensuring that employee connections to your infrastructure are always patched and backups are always up to date.

Single-Provider Solutions are Smarter Selections

Working with a single provider that can deliver both services—endpoint protection and endpoint backup—is easier on your MSP and more effective for your customers. It also allows for a simplified pitch to your customers in areas that many consider overwhelming.