Good hygiene and a healthy immune system are essential to fighting foreign intruders like viruses and microscopically malicious bacteria. Much like the human body, protecting the pores of your network are critical to staving off viruses of the digital variety.

It may be a corny comparison, but it’s a common sense approach to endpoint security—one that the expert analysts over at Forrester seem to agree with.

“Endpoint security represents the frontline in your fight against cyber attackers,” says Forrester’s Chris Sherman on the agency’s quarterly report on endpoint security suites, known as The Forrester Wave.

Endpoints, after all, are the most vulnerable point in your network. Hackers know this. End users are the favored target of cybercriminals. All it takes is one bad link in a cleverly disguised phishing email or a vulnerability in an unauthorized application in order to take down your network.

In the last few years, the game has changed. The popularity of ransomware—and the big payouts associated with this tactic—are luring more cybercriminals to the space. It’s becoming an all-out assault on endpoints.

According to Forrester, corporate endpoints are the most targeted group of assets. A recent Forrester survey shows that the top three targeted assets in external cyberattacks are corporate severs, corporate-owned devices, and employee-owned devices.

IT security used to live and die by antivirus software, but traditional AV isn’t cutting it as your lone form of protection. Forrester says antivirus technologies are losing ground and the market has responded with a “fragmented” approach to endpoint security.

To address this issue, Forrester has set forth the following priorities. IT security vendors must address these three core needs of IT security buyers:

  1. Prevent malware and exploits from executing.
  2. Detect malicious activity post-execution.
  3. Remediate and contain malicious activity and potential vulnerabilities.

Forrester says any endpoint security suite worth its salt should be able to stop malware from loading into memory or keep an exploit from hijacking a running process. Advanced solutions can help you reduce your attack surface through techniques like application control.

Forrester also knows that hackers will inevitably breach some of these preventative measures, so they suggest implementing a solution that can detect malware and exploited apps – shutting them down before they wreak havoc.

Endpoint security suite solutions must also be to remediate detected threats. Forrester suggests the best security suites in this space can accomplish this with little admin involvement.

Forrester used the above criteria when it selected vendors to review for the report. Keep in mind that when Forrester issued this report in October of 2016, we were still LANDESK at the time. Since then, we’ve merged with HEAT Software to become Ivanti, bringing together security solutions from our former family of brands in order to increase our security offerings.

Click below to read The Forrester Wave. It’s a clear and honest look at all the top vendors in the endpoint security space and their solutions.

Layered security is the whole endpoint