Lower Costs and Reduce Risks by Protecting Endpoints

By Federica Della Noce

Today, most IT teams rely on fragmented endpoint security measures. Different types of security software may run on desktops, laptops and servers. Antivirus, anti-spyware, network threat protection and proactive threat protection may be managed independently at different locations. Not surprisingly, this piecemeal approach often leads to higher administrative costs. It can also result in increased risk, as hackers develop new tactics and use blended threats to gain unauthorized access to an organization’s systems and information.

To ward off threats more proactively and to cut down endpoint security costs, a growing number of businesses are developing a structured approach that integrates endpoints in a single, centralized management framework.

Endpoint security solutions protect an organization from known and unknown threats and enforce security policies on laptops, desktops, servers, and mobile devices. A combination of antivirus, anti-spyware, firewall, intrusion prevention, device and application control and network-independent access control can provide comprehensive security for systems and networks.

The Value Delivery Research Study
The Value Delivery Research (VDR) study was designed by the Alchemy Solutions Group, a global services consulting firm, to show how endpoint protection solutions can deliver substantial cost and performance benefits to businesses of different sizes and across many industries. The Alchemy team identified seven customers with end-user counts ranging from 170 to 30,000 and representing industries such as healthcare, financial services, the public sector and others. The Alchemy team worked with them to project the total operational and economic impact (TOEI) of an organization-wide implementation of endpoint protection.

Study Results: A State Government Organization
One of the customers participating in the study was a state government organization supporting 30,000 end users. With over 1,000 IT employees, this organization has faced a variety of security challenges. Over the past three years, the company has been struck by the Nimda virus (which significantly affected end users’ ability to function on the job), a spybot that slowed network traffic, and most recently, two phishing attacks. In addition, processes and best practices were inconsistent throughout the organization, and delays in the execution of security-related measures had a negative impact on overall readiness.

For this organization, the VDR study showed that a company-wide implementation would result in the following:

• A TOEI of more than $3.4 million from 2007 to 2008
• Centralized management of many tasks that were currently decentralized, including application control, location awareness and log file monitoring of the multiple levels of government agencies and offices 
• Improved ability to detect attacks early

Study Results: A County Government Organization
The second-largest company in the VDR study was a county government serving nearly one million citizens and supporting 6,000 end users in approximately 70 locations. This organization provides a variety of public services, including court and prison systems, health and human services and tax and collection services. The security budget is included in the overall IT budget, but firewall management, spam, e-mail filtering and management of the county Web site are currently outsourced.

Security challenges faced by this organization include keeping track of changes to end-user access rights as users move from department to department and access control issues regarding unmanaged PCs that can enter the network.

The VDR study showed that an organization-wide implementation would result in the following:

• A TOEI of almost $300,000 for 2007 and 2008
• A more efficient -- and effective -- security administration
• Fewer security management tools to manage

Key Results
The VDR study showed that endpoint protection can help companies, regardless of industry and size, implement proactive security strategies while delivering significantly lower security administration costs. Specifically, the seven customers that participated in the study reported an annual TOEI ranging from $24,000 to $5.3 million, with average savings of more than $280 per end user.

In addition, the study found that adopting endpoint protection can help organizations to:

• Reduce the cost and complexity of providing security to endpoints
• Eliminate up to 75 percent of the processes required to manage endpoint security solutions
• Manage all solutions from a single console
• Find time to address critical issues such as data loss
• Tie security operations to IT risk management
• Make day-to-day activities simpler, automated and measurable

Conclusion
Given today’s increasingly mobile workforce and volatile threat landscape, any business can benefit from implementing endpoint protection. By adopting integrated security management, organizations can expect to reduce operating costs by as much as 75 percent while achieving significant improvements in endpoint security, including better threat monitoring and improved device and application control.

Federica Della Noce has over 10 years experience writing and editing content for a variety of Web sites.