EDR – an important tool for businesses due to increasing number of cyber-attacks

The endpoint detection and response (EDR) market was valued at $13.60 billion in 2023 with a projected growth to $30.29 billion by 2032 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.3%.  As Forrester points out, it is EDR that’s allowing for companies to ‘distance themselves from competitors’. EDR webs automation and agility to cybersecurity, allowing for organisations to layer their security across their network infrastructure and embrace the potential of a technology that’s designed to help IT teams navigate the complexities of evolving threats and changing ways of working. It is, says Caesar Tonkin, Managing Director at Armata Cybersecurity, an agile way of mitigating the disruption caused by the cyber-threat landscape.

“Data breaches are highly disruptive, especially when cyber-attackers successfully infiltrate an organisation’s data source and expose sensitive and confidential data,” he continues. “It has a direct impact on a company’s reputation – customers feel uncertain about the security of their data, trust is lost, and companies can potentially lose income. It’s a hit that hurts the business on multiple levels from trust to cost, and it can take a long time to recover.”

The statistics prove the point. The total cost of damages caused by cybercrime were estimated at $6 trillion in 2021 which made it the third-highest economy, globally, after China and the United States, at the time. This has increased significantly since then – the average cost of a breach was $4.45 in 2023 – to $9.5 trillion a year. Then there’s the trust cost factor and the fact that, according to Harvard Business Review, Moody’s evaluates a company’s cybersecurity when allocating a credit rating. 

“Investing into security has become synonymous within investing into the business,” says Tonkin. “Companies can’t sit back and hope that their security will measure up to the next threat. Especially as remote working becomes increasingly common – security teams aren’t just putting out local fires anymore. They’re now looking at every door opened by employees all over the world and it’s become exponentially harder to monitor threats.”

EDR is taking its moment to sit in the sun because it offers security teams the ability to continuously monitor, detect and respond to threats and malicious activity on endpoints and servers. Unexpected threats that have avoided anti-virus or other security systems get caught in the sticky EDR web, bolstered by the technology’s ability to use advanced threat detection capabilities to effectively protect against cyber-threats. The technology is designed to offer more advanced security capabilities and to detect and respond to a wider range of threats. Also, for tired security teams, the automation is no small bonus.

“EDR undertakes constant data collection and analytics, providing reports to a central dashboard so teams have constant and complete visibility into all endpoints from one place,” says Tonkin. “It offers real-time monitoring and can detect advanced malware and harmful threats orchestrated by sophisticated threat actors.”

EDR isn’t a solo solution, it should be used in conjunction with ongoing user training, next-generation security protocols and a cohesive security ecosystem, but it’s definitely a necessary one. It gives the enterprise a layer of security that is often missed by traditional security setups, and it is fast, accurate and proactive. It forms part of a more proactive and resilient security strategy that doesn’t leave security teams always feeling as if their posture is back-foot defensive.

Concludes Tonkin: “Vulnerability scanning, technical policy compliance, threat feeds, automated remediation, patch management – organisations need an advanced cyber-defence service that leverages EDR to provide a sophisticated solution to an increasingly challenging problem.”

Picture Cred: IBM