Self-healing endpoint platform suppliers are being pushed to develop fresh approaches to assist CISOs in combining tech stacks while enhancing cyber-resilience. Self-healing platforms have the ability to lower expenses, improve visibility, and collect real-time data that measures how resilient their systems are to cyberattacks. The risk profile that their boards of directors desire is one that lowers costs while boosting cyber-resilience.
A self-healing endpoint is one that uses adaptive intelligence and self-diagnostics to recognise a suspected or actual breach attempt and take prompt action to thwart it. Self-healing endpoints can automatically turn off, verify that all OS and application versions are accurate, and then reset to an optimum, secure configuration.
Enterprise end-user expenditure on endpoint protection solutions is expected to skyrocket from $9.4 billion in 2020 to $25.8 billion in 2026, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 15.4%, according to Gartner. By the end of 2025, according to Gartner's forecast, more than 60% of businesses will have switched from traditional antivirus software to endpoint protection platform (EPP) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions that integrate prevention with detection and response. But for the market to grow to its full potential, self-healing endpoint suppliers must quicken innovation.
In a recent analysis titled "The Future of Endpoint Management," Forrester, a major market research company worldwide, identified the key themes that will propel evolution in the endpoint management market. For organisations that adopt these trends, they lead to an enhanced employee experience, more operational effectiveness, and a smaller attack surface.
According to Forrester, "modern endpoint management" is guided by six principles: automation, context awareness, self-service, cloud-centricity, and analytics. By utilising them, the end user experience is brought front and centre and the flexibility of the hybrid workforce is enabled. Although progress has been made and steps have been taken in the direction of implementing these principles, Forrester admits that endpoint management as a practise still has issues, including high costs, a lack of integration with security, and poor employee privacy. The research gives professionals advice on how to overcome these challenges by paying attention to cutting-edge market trends like self-healing.
A business endpoint can only be dependable if it runs smoothly and according to plan. By downloading unsupported third-party programmes or falling for phishing scams, employees have the potential to maliciously or accidentally compromise their endpoints. Many nefarious threat actors use human mistake as an excuse to disable security software on enterprise equipment. A self-healing solution ensures that critical applications are monitored for tampering, degradation, and failure so that automation can be used to repair or even reinstall the problematic or missing app. This mitigates against such compromises.
Self-healing can exist on three levels: the application, the operating system, and within the firmware. Forrester states that Absolute is among the “firmware-based technologies that ship embedded within the device and ensures that everything operating on the device functions correctly, e.g., endpoint agents, VPNs, and software. Even if administrators replace or reimage the hard drive, this persists.
By Forester's collaboration with nearly 30 system manufacturers, we are able to leverage the patented Absolute Persistence technology that is present in over 500 million devices for our Secure Endpoint solutions. Once turned on, the device is ferociously tough and can withstand attempts to deactivate it, even if the firmware is flashed, the hard drive is changed, or the device is re-imaged.
Forrester recently examined anonymized data from various subsets of more than 14 million Absolute-enabled devices that were in use by around 18,000 global customers over a two-week timeframe. Additionally, it used data and details from reliable outside sources. Although we noticed a slight increase in the adoption of Windows 11 in the enterprise, we found more Chrome OS devices in education. Many of the devices were running Windows 10.
The researchers found that the average Windows 10 device is 59 days behind on patches, with the biggest delays reported by the government and professional services (83 and 75 days). The delay worsens when education is included, with gadgets being, on average, 115 days behind. These devices were vulnerable to more than 200 vulnerabilities that have a cure available, including 21 that are judged critical and one that is currently being exploited, according to the total number of vulnerabilities fixed on Patch Tuesday in July and August.
Every endpoint is a possible target for hackers, but those that have sensitive data on them, including PII and PHI, are more dangerous. Additionally, as a result of users being widely dispersed and highly mobile, they are now able to access systems and data from off-network locations, increasing the possibility that data will be stored locally and, consequently, the attack surface. According to our analysis, sensitive data was stored on 76% of enterprise devices on average, with financial services having the greatest percentage (84%).