How EDR Improves Incident Response

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is rapidly becoming one of the most commonly used tools for cyber and network security. There are a few reasons why EDR is specifically gaining so much traction in the security world today. Let’s look at how EDR improves incident response.

What Is EDR?

Before digging into the specifics of EDR in terms of incident response, it’s important to understand what it is and how it can provide value to enterprises. First, stakeholders need to know the significance of endpoints and the role they play in protecting networks.

An endpoint is essentially any kind of device that’s connecting to a network—whether it’s laptops, smartphones, or automated sensors. There has been a massive proliferation of unknown or difficult-to-secure endpoints connecting to enterprise networks over the past few years.

Among the reasons for this shift:

• Bring-your-own-device policies – Both due to convenience and comfort of workers, as well as the capital savings for corporations, BYOD policies have gained a lot of traction in recent years. But personal devices are a lot harder to secure and monitor than those provided by a central IT department.
• Growth of the Internet-of-Things – There have been rumblings about how IoT is going to radically change the world for some time now. It’s expected the number of IoT devices will continue to grow at a blistering rate—reaching a total of about 27 billion devices by 2025. While this can be great for improving operational efficiency, all of those new devices still need to be secured, which require continual updates and security patches, each provide a potential attack surface.
• Work-from-home initiatives – Even before the COVD-19 pandemic, many workplaces were already experimenting with remote or hybrid environments. As this trend continues into the future, enterprises need to consider how this will affect their endpoint security.

EDR responds to the aforementioned concerns by combining a unique platform of highly advanced tools to seek out and stop threats. Stakeholders might wonder if endpoint detection and response itself is necessary, or if the same duties can be accomplished by a different kind of platform. While it’s always wise to be skeptical of products or services that might not be totally needed, this isn’t really the case when it comes to EDR. As it stands, about 70 percent of breaches begin at endpoints.

Now that you have a basic understanding of EDR and why it matters today, it’s time to dig into how EDR actually improves incident response.

How Does EDR Improve Incident Response?

When facing a live threat triage situation, there’s no time for second-guessing. The response needs to be immediate and accurate in order to mitigate long-lasting damage. These are a few ways EDR helps improve incident response:

• Comprehensive monitoring and logging of endpoint activity – There are two key stages to identifying endpoint security threats sooner. The first is to have the right technology to collect data from endpoints that can also recognize when something is amiss. But this capability to spot anomalies can only come from analyzing historical data. Integrating data from across the network can help spot unusual endpoint behavior before it causes damage.
• Intelligent tools that can determine what’s worthy of alerting – Whether you’re using an internal security operations center or utilized a managed service, alert fatigue is a real thing. A good EDR will only alert human operators in situations where they might need to intervene. This saves time, while also keeping people sharp, as alerts will likely only come from legitimate threats worth more investigation.
• A team of experts behind the tools – EDR is only going to be fully effective if there are also live security experts there to interject when automated processes can’t do any more. While EDR can let engineers know something is afoot, having the right team behind the tools is still necessary.

EDR is a popular choice for securing endpoints for a reason. It’s not just the name. EDR provides some of the most in-depth remediation approaches for keeping endpoints safer through improved incident response.