Endpoint Sprawl Raises Security Risks

The explosion of endpoint devices is making it even more challenging for IT departments and security teams to obtain both visibility and control over these devices. According to a new report from Ponemon Institute sponsored by endpoint management provider Adaptiva, the typical enterprise manages a whopping 135,000 endpoint devices.

Almost half (48%) of those enterprise devices are not detected by the IT department or the device’s software is outdated. Either way, the situation creates tremendous risk. The survey behind the report, Managing Risks and Costs at the Edge, is based on responses from 629 IT and IT security practitioners and found that lack of visibility to be the most significant barrier to effective endpoint security at 63% of organizations, more prominently than lack of in-house expertise (45%), attacks against older vulnerabilities (44%) and lack of team ability to secure devices at speed and scale (42%).

Respondents believed the most significant threats to their endpoints include ransomware (48%), zero-day attacks (45%), DDoS (45%), credential theft (39%) and distribution point sprawl (34%).

Successful attacks are coming through enterprise email (41%), APIs (36%), software update/patching (35%) and via website (21%). It’s the lack of automation and reaching endpoints that are creating the most challenges with endpoint patching, the report found. Interestingly, only 36% of respondents said they are highly effective at performing endpoint maintenance without significant downtime and loss and only 35% are highly effective at maintaining endpoint regulatory compliance.

Most respondents believe that their risks are rising. In the past two years, 63% say it’s more important than ever to detect and prevent attacks that target their endpoints, and 49% said that the remote work trend is making such detection and prevention more difficult.

These increased risks aren’t due to a lack of effort on organizations’ parts, either. The average annual IT budget for organizations represented in the survey is $184.4 million; respondents claimed that 25% of the IT budget is allocated to IT security and an average of 20% is allocated to endpoint management. Still, only 24% said the budget is more than adequate.

Endpoint protection is costly, with an annual average cost of $4.2 million, which breaks down to $31.50 per endpoint spent on endpoint management. An average of $507,250 is spent annually on the IT and IT security help desk and 30% of that budget, on average, is spent annually on endpoint issues.

That budget is broken down as follows, according to the survey: Responding to breaches or failures (25%), delivering security updates (25%), distributing software to clients (19%), compliance (19%), and managing content distribution points (12%).

In the past twelve months, 54% of respondents said their organizations suffered five successful attacks on their organizations’ endpoints. The average cost of those attacks reached $1.8 million annually, or $360,000 per attack. Respondents believe that implementing automation could cut those costs by an average of 25% annually.

To address these threats, organizations need more and better visibility, a more efficient patch management process and a stronger awareness of the potential impacts of endpoint-related threats.