By J2 Software sales director Roy Alves
Is endpoint security keeping pace with how attackers actually operate today? Barely and only if you are proactive. Today’s attackers are not the amateurs of the past. They are stealthy, adaptive and exploiting the very conveniences we rely on every day. Ransomware targeting endpoints has surged, often riding in on unpatched vulnerabilities or phishing emails made even more convincing by AI.
Malware free attacks using legitimate tools like PowerShell are on the rise, bypassing traditional signature-based detection. Add the chaos of BYOD and remote work, where unmanaged devices are increasingly common, and you have a recipe for disaster: 88 percent of lateral movement in breaches leverages RDP exploits.
EDR solutions integrated with threat intelligence are improving, offering real time visibility into emerging threats like supply chain compromises or browser exploits. But the challenge remains, many companies are reactive, patching after the breach instead of predicting attacks with AI driven behavioural analytics.
If your endpoint strategy is not simulating attacker playbooks or embracing zero trust principles, you are always behind, playing catch up while attackers lead the game.
Stacking more tools: Protection or complexity?
It is the siren song of cybersecurity sales: just one more layer. But stacking tools often turns your security stack into a Frankenstein’s monster, powerful in theory, paralysed in practice. Tool sprawl, where organisations hoard overlapping solutions without decommissioning old ones, creates IT fatigue. Administrators end up juggling ten or more consoles, missing critical alerts amid the noise.
Overlapping functionalities inflate costs by up to 30 percent, while poor integration creates blind spots that attackers love. Worse, this complexity increases response times or even drowns teams in false positives. More tools rarely mean more protection. They breed inefficiency. Smart leaders consolidate into unified platforms, prioritising integration over accumulation, and reclaim focus and ROI.
Measuring endpoint strategy effectiveness
Counting blocked threats is feel good fluff. Real effectiveness ties security to business outcomes. Start with core endpoint measures: threat detection rate, aim for 95 percent plus on simulated attacks, endpoint coverage, 100 percent of devices protected including shadow IT, and uptime, downtime under 1 percent due to security interventions.
Layer in broader KPIs: mean time to detect and respond should trend under 24 hours for high severity incidents, while patch compliance hits 98 percent. Track ROI and user focused metrics like false positive rates. Benchmark against frameworks like NIST, visualise trends, and evolve with the threats. If your metrics are stagnant, it is time to audit. Effective strategies do not just block threats, they adapt.
Balancing usability, cost, and control
Too much control kills productivity, too little invites breaches, and runaway costs make security leaders unpopular. In endpoint security, this shows up as agents that hog CPU or policies so strict they provoke shadow IT. The solution is adaptive, user centric design: passwordless authentication, risk based access, and consolidated agents reduce friction without sacrificing control.
Modern UEM can cut overhead by 40 percent while boosting efficiency. Budget wise, scalable SaaS models beat perpetual licenses, keeping spend at 10 to 15 percent of IT budget. Usability is not a luxury, it is the glue between control and cost. Treat users as allies, and endpoints perform better with fewer tickets and stronger defences.
Zero Trust: The only way forward
Zero Trust adoption is accelerating. Gartner predicts roughly 60 percent of organisations will adopt Zero Trust as their security baseline by 2025, with 70 percent of new remote access deployments using ZTNA instead of traditional VPNs. Hybrid work models, cloud migration, and regulatory mandates are driving this shift. Yet Gartner also warns that up to 30 percent of initiatives will be abandoned by 2028 due to cost, complexity, cultural resistance, and lack of integration.
Zero Trust must be treated as a long-term programme aligned to business risk, implemented in discrete projects, and prioritising high value use cases. Enforce least privilege access, strong identity and access management, continuous auditing, and leverage AI enabled platforms that span all users and devices. Success is not optional, without proper planning and alignment to business objectives even well-funded programmes risk failure.
The bottom line
Attackers are not waiting. Your endpoint strategy cannot afford to wait either. Ditch tool hoarding, measure what matters, design for humans first, and embrace Zero Trust. The goal is not taller walls, it is smarter, leaner, adaptive defences. Organisations that fail to change their approach will be left chasing attackers who have already moved on.
