Protect endpoints
To protect endpoints, an organization must implement Zero Trust principles. This means you need to configure a "never trust, always verify" approach across all endpoints, regardless of whether they belong to an organization or are owned by a contractor, a partner, or an employee.
To successfully secure endpoints, an organization should achieve the following:
- Cloud enforced security policies. This needs to cover endpoint security, app protection, device compliance, device configuration, and risk posture.
- The operating system (like Windows), and apps that run on devices are securely provisioned, configured, and kept up to date.
- Automatically and rapidly respond to security incidents and prevent organizational data from being extracted from endpoints.
- The presence of an access control system that only allows access to data through policy controls.
Register endpoints with cloud identity providers
It's important for organizations to have visibility into all the devices used in the network. Having visibility into the devices helps organizations monitor and secure all endpoints so that access to valuable resources is managed.
To achieve this, the organization's IT team can carry out the following steps:
- Register all devices with identity providers.
- Require modern authentication.
An identity provider is a service that creates, maintains, and manages identity information across an organization. A familiar scenario is when a user logs into an app or a device with a username and password, the identity provider verifies if the user is authorized to have access.
Modern authentication tools help organizations remove the need for passwords altogether. This is referred to as passwordless authentication. With this method, users are expected to provide physical evidence to get access, like their fingerprint, or a proximity badge. This increases security because users must provide physical authentication, instead of passwords that can be hacked.
Getting your identity infrastructure configured correctly is vital to managing user access and permissions for your organization.
Grant access only to cloud-managed and compliant endpoints
To protect valuable information, access should only be given to endpoints that meet security requirements. If endpoints aren't compliant, it could allow the endpoint to become compromised, and result in serious consequences if it connects to the corporate network.
Organizations can define requirements using compliance policies. For example, your organization could have a policy that requires devices to have the latest operating system version installed or have antimalware protection enabled. Your IT team can create compliance policies using cloud-based modern device management tools. These are dedicated solutions designed to enable your organization to manage all its devices from the cloud, from preconfiguration before first use, to monitoring and enforcing configuration and security requirements continuously.
Your organization should also set remediation rules when you create policies, in case an endpoint is noncompliant. Remediation rules control how noncompliance issues should be resolved. For example, by alerting the user via email, blocking the endpoint, or applying a grace period after which the endpoint will be blocked if it isn't compliant.
Use endpoint threat detection to monitor risk and control access
It's important to implement threat detection for all endpoints in your organization so that you can monitor risk and control access across all devices. Endpoint threat detection gives you visibility into threats, vulnerabilities, and security risks in your environment. Your organization can use threat detection so that security analysts can prioritize alerts effectively, gain visibility into the full scope of a breach, and take response actions to remediate threats.
Finally, your organization can also take information such as device risk, and feed it as a source of data to your endpoint compliance policies and access policies. Multiple points of data help fine-tune your organization's authentication process by setting specific conditions that must be met before a resource is made available to a device user.