When businesses began embracing remote and hybrid work, the biggest concern was how to protect all their remote endpoints. Endpoint security policies became increasingly important, as organizations needed to create clear guidelines and rules for ensuring remote devices remained protected without compromising the ability to work remotely.
With the growth of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies and the Internet of Things (IoT), endpoint policy-based control became even more essential. Cyber threats are constantly growing, and businesses need ways to protect all their endpoints in increasingly diverse device ecosystems.
With that in mind, it’s time to explore endpoint security policies, why they matter, and how Splashtop AEM makes it possible to customize and enforce security policies across remote devices.
What is an Endpoint Security Policy?
An endpoint security policy is a set of rules and guidelines that define how devices within an organization are secured. This covers access control, device management, threat prevention, and incident response, among other security elements.
Endpoint security policies are essential for maintaining standardized rules to keep remote endpoints safe. Each endpoint connected to a company’s network, including laptops, servers, and mobile devices, must follow these guidelines. When these policies are properly followed, they can prevent unauthorized access, enforce security measures, and detect and respond to cyberattacks.
Strengthening Cyber Defenses with an Endpoint Security Policy
Endpoint security policies play a vital role in defending organizations from cyberattacks and other threats. These policies establish standardized security measures, creating a baseline level of cybersecurity that each endpoint should meet to defend against potential attacks.
Without an endpoint security policy, businesses can’t know if their devices are secure, especially in remote and BYOD environments. On the other hand, if a company enforces endpoint policy-based control across its endpoints, it can ensure that each device meets its security standards, ensuring consistent protection against vulnerabilities and potential threats.
Navigating the Complexities of Endpoint Security Policies
With that said, organizations may face some challenges when implementing endpoint security policies. It’s helpful to understand what these obstacles can be, so your team is ready to face them.
Common endpoint security policy challenges include:
Complex implementations: While writing a security policy may seem like a simple task, actually implementing it can be a greater challenge. Implementing security solutions across multiple endpoints can be a complex and time-consuming process, so IT teams should be prepared and understand the implementation process.
Ensuring compliance: When you have remote employees using their devices of choice, ensuring IT compliance can be a challenge. That’s why it’s important to use an endpoint management solution that can monitor and manage remote devices to ensure compliance with your security policies.
Managing diverse endpoints: In remote environments, especially ones with BYOD policies, employees can use a variety of devices for their day-to-day work, which can require different security features and solutions. Finding a solution that can support and manage each device can be a challenge.
Employee resistance: Whenever a company introduces new policies or changes, there will always be employee pushback. It’s important that employees understand the importance of your endpoint security policy, what it requires of them, and how it will improve their security and efficiency. Communication is key to employee buy-in.
Staying updated: New threats are always emerging, and new security patches and tools are constantly being released to combat these threats. Keeping up with every update can be a challenge, unless you have a solution that automatically detects new patches and keeps up-to-date with the latest threats to watch out for.
How to Deploy Endpoint Security Policies for Maximum Protection
When you’re ready to implement new endpoint security policies, you don’t have to go in blind. Following these steps can make deploying and enforcing security policies easy and efficient:
1. Evaluate the Existing Security Landscape
First, you need to understand your security needs and the threats your business faces. This will help you know what threats and vulnerabilities to watch out for so you can make informed decisions that guide your security strategy.
2. Set Clear Objectives and Scope
Next, establish clear goals for your security policy and the scope that it will encompass. This is another important step for guiding and informing your strategy, as it sets expectations and requirements your teams will need to keep in mind throughout the process.
3. Create the Endpoint Security Policy
Of course, actually creating the endpoint security policy is the hardest step. Fortunately, there are several best practices you can follow to create a robust and adaptive security policy:
Engage Stakeholders Across Departments
Ensure all stakeholders are involved in crafting the policy, so all your goals and needs are met. This includes IT, HR, legal, and any other department with cybersecurity needs, so everyone is invested in its success.
Ensure Simplicity and Clarity
An overly complex security policy is prone to confusion and failure. Keeping it simple, clear, and easy to understand will help avoid confusion and improve compliance, since employees will all understand their expectations.
Address Emerging Threats
New cyberthreats are constantly appearing, and a good cybersecurity policy should be able to address them. Make sure that your policy can address new threats that may emerge, including monitoring news, threat intelligence reports, and security updates.
Provide Ongoing Training and Awareness
The best way to ensure your security policies are followed closely is by instructing employees on what their expectations are and how they can follow the security policy. This keeps everyone informed, trained, and able to follow the policy to the best of their abilities.
Embrace Continuous Policy Improvement
No policy will be perfect, especially at first. It’s important to review your policy, identify areas for improvement, take feedback, and make adjustments to improve over time. This will help ensure an effective, flexible endpoint security policy that can keep up with new challenges and business needs.
4. Distribute and Educate Employees
Once the policy is set, make sure every department understands not only what the policy is, but why it matters, what it will require, and what each employee’s responsibilities will be. This ensures everyone is on the same page and your cybersecurity goals are aligned.
Streamline IT with Splashtop: Policy-Based Endpoint Security
Enforcing and managing endpoint security policies across remote environments and endpoints can be a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. With a solution like Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management), you can manage policies and secure endpoints from a single console.
Splashtop AEM makes it easy to customize and enforce security policies across endpoints. It provides real-time, AI-powered CVE insights, proactive alerts, and automated fixes via Smart Actions, as well as automated OS and 3rd party patching to keep devices up to date and secure.
Additionally, Splashtop AEM lets IT teams schedule and execute tasks across endpoints, including remote commands, mass deployments, and more. All this is managed from a single, centralized dashboard, making it easy to keep each device secure.
Splashtop AEM gives IT teams the tools and technology they need to monitor endpoints, proactively address issues, and reduce their workloads. This includes:
Customizable policy frameworks that can be enforced throughout your network.
Automated patching for OS, third-party, and custom apps.
AI-powered CVE-based vulnerability insights.
Tracking and management for hardware and software inventory across all endpoints.
Alerts and remediation to automatically resolve issues before they become problems.
Background actions to access tools like task managers and device managers without interrupting users.
Ready to experience Splashtop AEM for yourself? Get started today with a free trial:
