Endpoint Security Buyers' Guide 2024

State of the market: Endpoint security solutions protect endpoints (desktops, laptops, servers, mobile devices, and IoT devices) from attacks such as viruses and malware.

The endpoint security market is expected to reach a market value of around USD 15 billion by 2026.
The growth of the market can be attributed to an increase in the number of endpoint attacks (with particular focus on mobile endpoints), and the rising popularity of unmanaged or BYOD devices in the workplace.
- 81% of organizations have experienced an attack involving malware, and ransomware attacks increased by nearly 40% between 2022 and 2023.
- Personal devices are twice as likely to become infected with malware than their corporate-issued counterparts.
While the endpoint security market continues to grow, these tools are facing an evolution as IT and security teams call for protection that doesn’t hinder the end-user experience, and which can help them detect more advanced threats.

In this guide, we’ll give you our top recommendations on how to choose the right endpoint security provider. We’ll also cover what features to look for in an endpoint security tool, the benefits and challenges of implementing one, and the future trends that you should keep tabs on within the endpoint security space.

Our Recommendations: Before we get started, there are a few key points to bear in mind that’ll help you choose the right endpoint security tool for your business:

For large enterprises: Choose a solution that’s capable of monitoring large numbers of endpoints, without negatively impacting their performance.
For WFH organizations: Employees that work remotely are likely to be accessing work apps and data on-the-go, i.e., on mobile phones or tablets. So, choose a solution that offers mobile device protection. And if you have a BYOD policy, make sure your endpoint security tool can also protect unmanaged devices.
For protection against the latest threats: Choose a solution that regularly updates their threat detection model and/or incorporates the use of AI to assist in identifying new and emerging threats. This information should all be readily available on the provider’s website.
For best results: Don’t just rely on your endpoint security tool for all your cybersecurity needs. An endpoint security solution will protect you against endpoint threats; you also need to implement tools to cover your other attack vectors (e.g., web, cloud, and email), train your users to be security-conscious (SAT), and recover your data in the event of a successful attack (backup and recovery).

How Endpoint Security Works: The main goal of an endpoint security solution is to prevent, detect, and mitigate cyberattacks at the device level, before those attacks have a chance to spread through your network. Because of this, endpoint security solutions are typically deployed as an agent on each individual endpoint. Once deployed, they combine signature-based detection and ML-based behavioral analysis to:

Scan the devices locally for threats such as viruses and malware
Encrypt files to secure them against unauthorized access
Ensure only approved apps are installed on the device

They also relay all this information to a central management console, from which you can monitor all your company’s endpoints remotely. This console can be deployed in the cloud, on-prem, or via a hybrid approach.

It’s important to note that this is how traditional endpoint security solutions work. However, some endpoint security providers have begun expanding their offerings with Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) capabilities. This means that rather than just focusing on breach prevention, the solution can respond to threats after they’ve entered a system and detect more advanced threats, such as polymorphic attacks, fileless malware, and zero-day attacks.

Benefits Of Endpoint Security: There are multiple benefits to implementing a dedicated endpoint security solution to protect your organization’s endpoints.

First, they can protect you against attacks such as malware, spyware, and ransomware.

Endpoint security solutions identify threats in real-time and provide tools to help you manage and respond to security incidents. This reduces the risk of data breaches.

Second, an endpoint security solution can give you visibility over your entire endpoint attack surface via a single interface. There are two benefits to this:

By centralizing your endpoint security, you can reduce security risk across the organization quickly and effectively, without having to visit users’ endpoints to troubleshoot them in person. This also enables secure remote work.
By automating lots of the processes involved in monitoring, managing, and updating endpoints, an endpoint security tool can reduce a lot of the administrative overhead, freeing up your team to work on more creative tasks.

Finally, these tools are accessible to both SMBs and larger enterprises looking to reduce their risk of a breach.

Endpoint security tools are a highly scalable way of protecting your organization, often with the capacity to support thousands of devices as a time.
They’re also very cost-effective, which enables even smaller teams to leverage enterprise-grade protection.

Common Endpoint Security Challenges: Any organization, no matter size or industry, can be targeted by endpoint attacks. So, all organizations should implement some form of endpoint security. But picking a solution, it is worth considering the common challenges associated with traditional endpoint security solutions:

Performance impact: Endpoint security tools can cause performance drops on users’ endpoints when not properly managed. We recommend issuing your employees with new hardware where possible, and ensuring that you apply the latest updates to both the device and the endpoint security tool.
Device compatibility: Not all endpoint security solutions offer support for mobile devices; this can leave those devices vulnerable to attackers. If your end users access work apps or data on tablets or mobile phones, or if they work from home where you can’t easily monitor mobile device usage, we highly recommend looking for a solution that offers mobile device protection.
Changing threat landscape: The threat landscape is constantly changing, with attackers finding new ways to compromise users’ endpoints. We recommend finding a solution that’s regularly updated and offers AI/ML-driven protection to protect you against new and emerging threats.
Complexity: Deploying and managing an endpoint security solution can be complex and resource intensive. If you have a large number of endpoints to protect, we recommend dedicating a team to managing your endpoint security solution.

Best Endpoint Security Providers: Our team of cybersecurity analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of endpoint security solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

Features Checklist: When comparing endpoint security solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

Continuous monitoring: The solution should continuously monitor endpoints for threats such as viruses and malware. It should also continuously monitor inbound and outbound traffic to block malicious downloads.
ML-powered threat detection: The best endpoint security tools combine traditional signature-based detection methods with more modern machine learning-based methods that analyze behavioral patterns on the endpoint to identify suspicious activity that could indicate a new or emerging threat.
Data encryption: The solution should encrypt data that’s stored on the endpoint to protect it against unauthorized access and theft.
Application controls: You should be able to configure application control policies to prevent users from installing unauthorized—and therefore potentially malicious—apps.
Reporting and alerting: The solution should notify you immediately of any threats it detects so that you can respond swiftly, and you should be able to generate reports into historical threat and remediation activity.

Future Trends: There are three key trends that we expect to see as the endpoint security market continues to grow.

First is the further integration of AI and machine learning. While AI and ML have been utilized in the endpoint security space for a long time already, recent advances in the ML space could enable endpoint security solutions to analyze data more quickly and effectively, allowing them to detect more sophisticated attacks and potentially even respond to threats. This could also further bridge the gap between traditional endpoint security solutions and EDR platforms.

Second is a focus on blocking insider threats. As endpoint security tools further integrate ML and behavioral analytics, they’ll be able to identify when a user is acting “out of the norm”, which could indicate that the user is a malicious insider trying to exfiltrate data or gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Finally, we can expect more endpoint security providers to incorporate the Zero Trust principles into their solutions. This may involve continuous verification of files and applications, or the integration of user access controls.

Further Reading: You can find all of our articles on endpoint security in our Endpoint Security Hub.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few articles we think you’ll like:

Shortlist: The Top 11 Endpoint Security Solutions For Business
Interview: How SMBs Can Improve Cyber-Defenses, With Tony Anscombe
Interview: Ransomware Is Surging. Here’s What You Need To Know To Protect Your Team
Blog: The Top 5 Biggest Cybersecurity Threats That Small Businesses Face And How To Stop Them
Blog: How To Recover From A Ransomware Attack

Endpoint Security Buyers’ Guide 2024

How to choose the right endpoint security software.