Imagine this. You own a rapidly growing company. You can see your investment paying off through increased sales and finally have the cash flow required to expand your operations. You begin strategizing new ventures and start hiring new employees when suddenly, everything stops.
You’ve read about corporations and government agencies falling victim to cyberattacks, but never thought it would happen to you. But the day has come, and a hacker’s email phishing attack successfully lures one of your best employees to click a link that causes a data breach.
Beyond the substantial dollar cost to remediate your systems comes the loss of reputation and trust from your customers. Will you recover? The odds are against you; only 40 percent of small businesses survive for more six months after a cyberattack.
Can you picture it? As your company grows, the last thing you want is to jeopardize your success with security weaknesses. The cost of investing in security software is minimal compared to the possible damage caused by a breach. To protect your business as you continue to scale, you’ll want to consider top-of-the-line cybersecurity software.
Defining Endpoint Detection and Response Software
Beyond traditional antivirus software and pop up blockers is endpoint detection and response (EDR) software, a new mainstream technology that provides continuous monitoring and response to advanced threats.
EDR tools deploy a software agent on each endpoint, allowing for the monitoring of events across the network. The system records the information on the cloud where real-time alerts, analysis, investigation, and reporting occur.
While many different threat response and detection cybersecurity tools with various features and areas of emphasis exist on the market, they all provide a similar function: continuously monitoring, analyzing, preventing, identifying, and detecting current and emerging cybersecurity threats.
Out with the Old, In with the New
The investment in EDR tools for cybersecurity isn’t just good business; it is the right thing to do to protect your customers’ sensitive information. The list below highlights several reasons why it makes sense to equip your business with EDR software despite the considerable costs upfront.
- The More Your Business Grows, the More You Have to Lose– As you become more visible to the public, you become a bigger target. As your company grows, you have more money and data at stake, making you a more worthwhile target for hackers.
- You Have a Reputation to Protect– Cyberattacks that expose customer data will dramatically damage your public image. If you’re an emerging company, you likely won’t be able to withstand the fallout of a major attack.
- The Average Office Has Changed– More employees now work from home or use their own devices at work. It is no longer enough to wrap a fortress of cybersecurity around a centralized office network. As companies make moves towards remote work, endpoints spread across a wider geography.
- Growth Means More Employees– Every new employee is a new endpoint to protect. Also, there’s always the risk of internal attacks. It becomes harder to manage more devices unless you have advanced EDR software that allows IT managers to monitor the entire network from a single device.
- Cyberattacks Are Constantly Changing– Cyberattacks have increased and evolved. Standard antivirus software won’t cut it. Traditional antivirus software and ad blockers are only as good as the last update that deployed on the endpoint. With cloud-based EDR, you do not have to worry about updates.
- Legal Exposure and The Threat of Lawsuits- When a company fails to protect a customer’s information adequately, consumer protection attorneys may file a lawsuit against the company. If you have many customers, it does not take much for the complaint to turn into a class-action suit. Multiple consumers can come together and seek compensation and relief from the company.
Grow as You Go
As companies grow and earn their reputation, they become more enticing targets for hackers. To match your security capabilities to your growing business, you’ll want to invest in a modern cybersecurity platform that uses EDR tools as the underpinning. If you hope to protect your data and financial assets as you further develop your company, you take a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity. Layer your security efforts with EDR as well as the best data protection and IT practices implemented by well-educated employees who know when something looks suspicious.