Understanding the Differences Between Endpoint Protection and Endpoint Detection and Response

Regarding cybersecurity, many companies ask, “Which is better: endpoint protection or endpoint detection and response?”

While both are critical security capabilities, they’re not interchangeable. Choosing one over the other can seriously affect your organization’s security posture.

What is EDR?

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is next-level security that helps companies detect threats that manage to bypass your EPP or other tools. It also provides a way for cyber teams to respond in real-time, allowing them to take action on the most advanced attacks before they are discovered.

So, what is endpoint detection and response? EDR can help businesses understand what causes cyber attacks to succeed and how attackers spread across a network. This information can harden security against future attacks and reduce dwell time for a potential infection.

EDR can record behaviors and data that indicate suspicious activity using raw telemetry from endpoints. This includes processes running, programs installed, and network connections. It can also identify file and user activities that are suspicious or associated with malware.

This information can then be mapped to the framework, aiding in threat detection and analysis. This is an important feature for ensuring that the results of EDR investigations are usable, reliable, and transparent.

The best EDR solutions will collect data from all your endpoints and provide automated response capabilities. This enables organizations to proactively protect their devices without hindering employee productivity. It will also help detect suspicious behavior before a breach occurs.

What is EPP?

An endpoint protection platform (EPP) is a suite of tools that can protect laptops, desktops, servers, and mobile devices from malware, viruses, spyware, and other security threats. It may include a personal firewall, data encryption, intrusion prevention, device control, and other security features.

EPPs typically integrate with vulnerability, patch, and configuration management capabilities. They offer centralized management of all endpoints and security functions, allowing IT staff to monitor and manage everything from one dashboard or console.

Next-generation EPPs include advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect new threats and prevent malicious behavior. They also encrypt files to prevent ransomware attacks, so businesses can keep their critical data safe and secure.

In addition, an EPP should provide a single pane of glass for managing all endpoints and their security tools across your organization. This helps reduce IT teams’ time moving between screens and manually analyzing threat information.

Another key feature is the ability to centralize all updates, tasks, and reports for all endpoints. This saves IT staff and security analysts the hassle of updating their systems or working around outdated tools.

Modern EPPs can also incorporate behavior-based detection and response (EDR) functionality, allowing for threat hunting and incident response across endpoints rather than relying on manual searches. This allows organizations to respond more quickly to incidents and mitigate the damage from potential cyberattacks.

What is EDR for?

Endpoint protection is a security strategy that prevents cyberattacks on endpoints, including workstations and servers. It involves several steps, including blocking compromised accounts and responding to attacks that impact users.

While antivirus is a single program that scans and removes malware, EDR solutions provide an entire ecosystem of automated analysis and response that can help IT teams mitigate cyber risk across the digital network. The ability to detect and respond to malware, viruses, ransomware, and other threats on endpoints is essential to protecting the organization’s sensitive data and systems.

A strong EDR solution must detect and contain advanced threats before they can wreak havoc on a company’s operations and information assets. This is especially important for stealthy malware that can morph from a benign state to one of heightened sensitivity once it penetrates the perimeter defenses of your organization’s environment.

An EDR solution should be able to collect the critical details of an attack, such as the file that launched it or where it originated from, and use this knowledge to eliminate the threat. This can include automatically adjusting security protocols to ensure that future files are not susceptible to the same attack.

As an added benefit, the ability to triage alerts and respond automatically can reduce the stress on analysts as they navigate a growing number of security events. This can also improve analyst productivity, allowing them to spend more time on investigation and less time sifting through alerts that may be false positives.

What is EPP for?

Endpoint Protection (EPP) is software that provides preventative security measures for enterprise endpoint devices, including standard workstations and laptops, and handled and mobile devices (handheld and tablet PCs). It includes a range of capabilities such as antivirus, antispyware, intrusion detection/prevention, a personal firewall, and other endpoint security tools.

EPP is typically designed for large organizations with multiple endpoints that need unified protection across the IT landscape. It enables organizations to quickly and easily deploy and support secure endpoint devices while ensuring that critical data is not stolen or lost.

Malware is one of the most dangerous threats facing modern businesses, and EPPs can help protect against new malware and emerging cyberattack techniques that traditional protection systems cannot detect. For example, ransomware attacks that use fileless delivery methods are difficult to detect with traditional security tools.

The best EPP solutions are primarily cloud-managed, so they can continuously collect and scan activity data for potential security threats. They also can take remote remediation actions, even when a device is off the network.

The ideal EPP solution offers an open architecture that enables collaborative information sharing between endpoint security tools. This allows you to monitor everything with a single interface while reducing your IT team’s workload and enhancing threat intelligence.