Don’t Have Real-time Visibility and Control Over Your Endpoints? Your Business May Be at Risk

Since the pandemic began, 60 million people in Southeast Asia have become digital consumers. The staggering opportunities Asia’s burgeoning digital economy presents are reason enough to spur you into rethinking the way you do business.

This means one thing: digital transformation. Cloud adoption empowers organisations to adapt quickly to sudden market disruptions. Back when the pandemic was at its peak, hybrid work and enterprise mobile apps ensured critical operations were able to maintain business-as-usual despite lockdowns and border closures. Today, they are empowering an increasingly mobile workforce to stay productive—on their terms.

Facilitating this transformation saw organisations dismantling legacy infrastructures and adopting decentralised networks, cloud-based services, and the widespread use of employees’ personal devices.

But with this new cloud-enabled environment of mobile devices and apps, remote workspaces, and edge-computing components came substantial information gaps. Ask yourself if you have complete visibility of all your IT assets; there’s a good chance you’d answer no. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as 94% of organisations find 20% or more of their endpoints undiscovered and therefore unprotected. 

Why you can’t ignore your undiscovered (and unprotected) endpoints

The rapid proliferation of endpoints, which increases the complexity of today’s IT environments and introduces a broader attack surface for cyber criminals to exploit, only serves to underscore the importance of knowing all your endpoints. Here’s what will happen if you don’t.

Exposure to security risk. You need to keep your doors and windows locked if you want to secure your home. But what if you don’t know how many you have or where they are located? It’s the same with endpoints: you can’t protect what you can’t see. Knowing your endpoints and getting real-time updates on their status will go a long way to proactively keeping cyber threats at bay and responding to an incident rapidly—and at scale.

Poor decision-making. Access to real-time data relies on instantaneous communication with all your IT assets, the data from which enable your teams to make better-informed decisions. Yet current endpoint practices work with data collected at an earlier point in time. What this means is that by the time your team utilises the data, it’s already outdated. This, in turn, renders the insights they derived inaccurate, and in some instances, unusable.

Inefficient operations. Despite IT assets being constantly added to or decommissioned from the environment due to workforce shifts and new requirements, many enterprises still track their inventory manually with Excel spreadsheets. You can imagine their struggle to get a complete and accurate inventory of every single asset and the resulting guessing games IT teams need to play to figure out what to manage and patch without that inventory.

Getting a better handle on ever-present security threats 

Having a bird’s-eye view of your endpoints requires you to have the right tools to manage them, no matter the size or complexity of your digital environment. These should help regain real-time visibility and complete control by:

1. Identifying unknown endpoints that are yet to be discovered, evaluated, and monitored
2. Finding issues by comparing installations and versions of your software for each endpoint against defined software bundles and updates
3. Standardising your environment by instantly applying updates to out-of-date installations and installing software missing from endpoints that require them
4. Enabling automation of software management to further reduce reliance on IT teams by governing end-user self-service

You only stand to gain when you truly understand the importance of real-time visibility and complete control over your endpoints—and commit to it. In the case of insurer Zurich, having a high-resolution view over an environment with over 100,000 endpoints worldwide meant greater cyber resilience, savings of up to 100 resource hours a month, and deeper collaboration between cybersecurity and operations.

Secure your business with real-time visibility and complete control over your endpoints. Learn how with Tanium.