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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

May - 2009 - issue > Technology

How best to secure your Endpoint

Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu
Until a few years ago Information security was not a priority for many organizations. With the advent of the Internet, it has created a world without boundaries. With these changes the threat landscape evolved and information security became the need of the hour. Today, identifying security challenges and specific security threats to your data have become very crucial. The counter-measures used to mitigate each threat are equally challenging. It is a known fact that malicious code “phoning home”, worms, intrusions, outbound attacks and botnets, have become common.

Perimeter is not what it used to be mobility has made the network porous. From a business perspective mobile devices are a productivity tool and a business necessity but from a security perspective a significant threat. This has necessitated formulation of a security strategy and policies in place that keeps mobile devices locked down and mobile data protected. There exist numerous back doors in today’s network and data is often left unprotected to defend for itself. Data has many enemies from Spyware to Removable media. Personal devices of individual users and misuse of company owned devices and resources through P2P applications and Web mail pose serious threat. Complicating matters are increasing instances of lost or stolen devices. Industry analysts estimate that between 1,500- 3,000 laptops are stolen each day.

While threats continue to increase, so do the number of endpoint security applications and management consoles to manage these numerous applications. It is common for enterprise PC to run separate security agents for antivirus, desktop firewall, anti-spyware, and file or disk encryption software, each centrally managed by a single-purpose console. It is not possible to cut cost or do away without securing imperative data. If one uses the multi-agent approach, it makes it costly and time consuming for administrators to update, monitor, test, and manage security policy for these applications, including all the required software and signature updates.

Every business organization would want to have a control over their endpoint security. They would need to implement a centralized, unified approach to resolve most of their endpoint related security issues. Most of the organisations would want to invest in endpoint security once and for all because it is cost effective, saves time and most of all since it is centralized, a unified approach to addressing critical endpoint security makes business environment more secure.
Here are six endpoint security essentials for companies to shore up their defences:

Mitigate Malware

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