In today’s digital-first world, application and network integrity and security are paramount. However, alarming new data has revealed critical vulnerabilities that, if ignored, can have devastating consequences for businesses.
Application health is often an overlooked and undervalued piece of the cyber resilience puzzle. Spending on cybersecurity has skyrocketed over the past decade, with billions of dollars invested each year in adding new security features to prevent attacks. Despite these investments, breaches continue to occur in record numbers and are becoming more sophisticated. One reason for this is that with the introduction of each new feature, it also introduces a new layer of complexity to the endpoint, which compromises the health of the applications deployed to protect devices, data, and users. This is to help you.
To fully understand this issue, we need hard data. Absolute’s Persistence technology is built into the firmware of his more than 600 million endpoints worldwide. When enabled, it provides customers with valuable telemetry about their endpoints and the applications installed on them. The result is a unique perspective on device health, commonly used security and business applications, and network connectivity.
To uncover the complexities and vulnerabilities we face, we recently analyzed data from thousands of customers covering nearly 5 million Absolute-enabled endpoints. The results discussed below highlight why robust tools that can strengthen both endpoint and network resiliency are needed.
Let’s dig into this data to find out more.
Delayed patching
Enterprise Windows 10 devices experience an average patching delay of 63 days. This essentially means that these devices are exposed to known vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious entities for more than two months. Most security teams know that patching is a critical control for maintaining security, but many of those teams don’t realize how outdated their systems are.
Security app overload
With an average of more than 11 security applications installed on corporate devices, you might think they’re well-protected. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, an overabundance of security tools can lead to duplication, conflict, and ultimately dysfunction, leaving gaps in defense mechanisms.
Vulnerable remote access tools
With the rise of remote work, secure remote access tools are more important than ever. However, a whopping 1 out of 4 devices has remote access tools installed that are either not installed correctly, have a corrupted configuration, or have a stopped process. This lack of network security poses a risk not only to your data but also to the endpoint devices themselves.
Concerns about encryption
An astonishing 17% of active corporate devices lack full encryption over a 30-day period. A closer look at the data magnifies the concerns. 15% of these unencrypted devices contain sensitive data such as PII and PHI. This means that one in six unencrypted corporate devices could become a goldmine for cybercriminals. Enabling encryption is often a legally required control, and organizations can be held liable if they cannot prove encryption is enabled. Unfortunately, cryptographic controls often result in non-compliance.
Sensitive data in motion
Data is the lifeblood of your business, so protecting it is paramount. Yet, 75% of corporate laptops store sensitive data, and 19% have high capacity (500+ instances). The vulnerability of this data is further exacerbated when considering the presence or absence of encryption. These numbers paint a clear and worrying picture. The complexity and weakness of endpoint security controls means that even though organizations invest significant amounts of money to secure endpoints, devices still fall short of the desired level of protection.
What will happen next? Enter resilience and self-healing applications.
Self-healing applications are designed to automatically detect and fix faults and vulnerabilities, reducing the need for human intervention. In light of our data, such applications autonomously avoid vulnerabilities, whether due to patching delays, conflicts between endpoint apps, or tampering by inadvertent or malicious users. It can be identified and dealt with. In addition to collecting telemetry data about endpoint health, Absolute Application Resilience also provides the ability to automatically restart, remediate, or reinstall non-compliant applications.
Over the past 90 days, our Application Resilience has performed millions of remediation actions, averaging over 1.5 remediations per endpoint per month. To provide context to the business, if he has 1,000 users, he will run a remediation approximately every 30 minutes. The frequency and variety of automated remediation highlights the extent of health issues within mission-critical endpoint tools and the positive impact automation can have on remediating these issues.
In an age of complex and widespread cyber threats, being reactive is no longer enough. Enterprises must take a proactive approach and incorporate advanced solutions such as self-healing applications to help devices withstand, adapt and quickly recover from threats.
Only by embracing resilience can we secure our digital future.