Best Practices: Enterprise Threat Defense

Security is not a one-size-fits-all

While one organization may classify some risk as critical, another organization may consider it to be far less of a concern. Variations in risk assessment and classification are unique to each organization and are driven by their business and compliance needs, as well as industry-specific requirements. Regardless of where your company’s cybersecurity needs lie, however, all enterprises share a common goal: to establish and maintain a strong security posture.

In our paper, Best Practices: Enterprise Threat Defense, explore proven strategies to enhance your cybersecurity plan. Discover some of the ways that your organization can achieve this feat.

Building a multi-layered, defense-in-depth strategy

Security means many things to different people; it all depends on what’s at stake for the individual or the enterprise. One thing that security is not is an app you install or a service that monitors for malware — or any other such singular component that operates in a vacuum.

When speaking of a security solution, one that combats the various risks across the modern threat landscape, it’s critical to dive deeper into the meaning of the word “solution” to granularly look at the multiple best practices that come together to form a cohesive solution. That is the essence of defense-in-depth: multiple strategies working together to mitigate threats and attacks.

Take, for example, vulnerability assessments. With this, Security teams can identify where holes in the organization’s cybersecurity plan exist and their criticality. Next, this risk assessment data is utilized to address issues, beginning with the highest severity through patching and update campaigns. Combining these with threat information, IT can implement additional strategies to defend against future threats, such as implementing Multi-Factor Authentication to ensure only authorized users and devices are allowed access to protected business resources. At the same time, risk findings can be turned into learning opportunities for end-users by providing them with security awareness training so that they are armed with the knowledge to spot common attack attempts, like phishing, so as to not fall prey to threat actors' tactics. Lastly, by incorporating each of these strategies alongside integrated management (MDM) and security solutions (EndpointSecurity), IT and Security teams can work quickly when responding to incidents — both to assess and stop the threat but also to remediate the vulnerability before it has a chance to evolve into something far worse.

Complying with data security and privacy standards

Compliance lies at the heart of security. Whether your company aligns its business operations with best practices for security or is part of a regulated industry, like healthcare, that must abide by very specific privacy laws as it performs patient services. The key to ensuring that organizations meet the requirements relating to regulations is compliance. Conversely, compliance is also the means by which organizations will prove their adherence to the regulations when being audited as part of their regular compliance cadence.

One way to ensure compliance is through the implementation of policies. By default, IT configures endpoints to meet a specific compliance outcome. While it would be ideal if devices just keep these configurations intact, the reality is that there are a number of reasons why a device would lose or otherwise experience a change of configuration. While not extensive, some of the most common occurrences are:

• Application updates
• End-user modifications
• Malicious code
• System-related dependencies

The key to keeping device configurations compliant is policies. Compliance policies ensure that, regardless of what caused the change to occur, the management solution will identify the device as being out of compliance, triggering the execution of an automated workflow to bring the device back into compliance by correcting the issue. An example of both a best practice and how policies work to maintain compliance consider Volume Encryption on mobile devices. Enabling it protects data stored locally on devices by effectively scrambling it so that users without a decryption key cannot read it. Unfortunately, anyone with access to a mobile device can easily turn this feature off by authenticating to the device and disabling passcodes altogether. However, with a passcode-required policy enabled in MDM, when a device is detected as being out of compliance, the policy will automatically re-enable passcodes and immediately prompt the device’s user to enter and confirm their passcode. In the process, Volume Encryption is also re-enabled, ensuring data security is compliant.

Simplifying IT and security workflows for greater efficiency

The policy in the section above is a small yet powerful example of how simplifying IT doesn’t compromise security but strengthens it. Through automation, greater efficiency is gained by developing workflows to handle repetitive functions and/or those that may be too time-consuming to be processed in a reasonable amount of time.

Consider the paraphrasing of Bruce Schneier’s more extensive quote, “Complexity is the enemy of security.” With that in mind, simplification is our friend when it comes to IT and Security. As the paper discusses in greater detail, security automation, like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), are a boon for cybersecurity for a number of reasons, not the least of which is AI/ML’s ability to process and analyze large data sets from multiple sources. This allows AI/ML to make recommendations on how to best protect the current state of a corporation’s infrastructure based on the information it has learned about cybersecurity, known and unknown threats, and comparing it to the telemetry data gathered through monitoring.

In short, what may take a member of the Security team days or weeks to comb through, AI/ML can do so within minutes and calculate the best possible course of action. This level of incident response has the potential to not only reduce response and remediation times, but it can certainly mean the difference between preventing a threat or having to clean up after a data breach.

Comprehensive, modern threat defense

Our close partnership with Apple made Jamf the leader in device management for Apple devices, but it is our unique insight into endpoint security — drawing from Jamf’s extensive experience with Apple (and other operating systems, like Windows and Android) — that makes us experts in the mobile device security space.

The Best Practices: Enterprise Threat Defense paper draws from this deep well of knowledge, the same Jamf uses when developing endpoint security solutions, to provide cybersecurity solutions that comprehensively protect endpoints against threat actors targeting your desktop and mobile devices, providing parity in protections regardless of the device type, OS or ownership model used, extending security across your infrastructure — whether that’s onsite or off, over trusted network connections or public hotspots.

We worry about keeping enterprise resources safeguarded so you can focus on being your most productive.