4 ways to strengthen your endpoint security strategy as an MSP

As an MSP, one of the best ways to secure your customers' devices is to deploy a layered endpoint security strategy. By following this approach, you establish a proactive posture, which helps prevent intrusion attempts and breaches, and is complemented by continuous monitoring and response capabilities to minimize the risk of incidents. This benefits your customers and helps boost their confidence in your business, enhancing your cybersecurity offering and management.  

How can you strengthen your endpoint security strategy? 

Nowadays it’s essential to modernize your customers' current endpoint security strategy to protect their devices and data. Endpoint protections enable you to monitor application behavior and detect advanced attacks using living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques. By taking the four steps below, you will be able to consolidate your endpoint security strategy, offer a better service and gain efficiency:  

1- Conduct a vulnerability assessment to identify security gaps that put endpoints at risk:

This enables you to gain a better understanding of the threats in your environment and an in-depth view of your customers' current system.  Armed with this knowledge, you can identify strengths and weaknesses, address specific needs and build a plan based on this data to protect customers’ key digital assets. Regular assessments are required to help detect problems early and halt their progress before they become major cybersecurity risks.  

2- Patch everything, patch early, and patch often:

Patch management is a vital part of maintaining and securing your customers' networks to keep all operating systems and software up to date. Ransomware attacks such as WannaCry and NotPetya relied on unpatched vulnerabilities to spread around the world. However, this task can be challenging, especially when dealing with customers who use a range of software products. This is where a patch management tool can assist in accomplishing this task more efficiently and effectively. This tool automates the process of finding, installing, and testing patches, ensuring that all your customers' devices are adequately protected against the latest vulnerabilities. 

3- Introduce new protection measures for comprehensive endpoint security:

You should implement robust anti-phishing protection with different layers of security at the endpoint and perimeter. When opting for the ideal solution to protect endpoints and your customers' data, you should ensure that it includes security controls such as continuous monitoring with EDR, URL and web browsing filtering, or encrypted file recovery with backups. The solution should also include attack surface reduction, threat prevention, detection and response, proactive hunting and remote connection of endpoints for fast and effective response. 

Watchguard’s Advanced EPDR solution, which is part of our Unified Security Platform, not only covers all these aspects, but also provides an IoC search engine and advanced IoA detections mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. This enables you to detect threats without having to deal with complex queries, helping you build a robust and efficient endpoint security strategy to protect your customers. You also need to make sure your security products are properly configured and up to date. 

4- Integrate security tools that improve data loss prevention and unified management:

Manually managing each of your customers' devices is neither possible nor pragmatic. Bringing together a number of disparate security solutions can lead to a range of problems such as poor system integration, redundant alerts, or overwhelming administration tasks. In contrast, centralized management can provide a unified view of all devices on the network, making it easier to identify and track threats. This centralized approach also allows you to add XDR capabilities to accelerate threat detection and response. More solutions from the same vendor integrated into the XDR means greater visibility as well as stronger protection. 

Protecting your customers' endpoints need not be difficult, and by taking these measures you can improve their security posture, reduce the risk of attack, and enhance your service offering.