Protecting Data Where it Resides
To reduce information exposure, small businesses must secure both their managed and unmanaged endpoints—because that’s where the information resides. Since managed endpoints are within an organization’s administrative control, persistent agents can be used to implement appropriate countermeasures. This is important, as these endpoints often have more extensive rights for accessing and storing information, which in turn signals the need for more robust security measures.

Among the most effective tools for protecting managed endpoints are antivirus, personal firewall, and intrusion protection technologies. While antivirus tools are ubiquitous today, the most effective protection comes from technologies that include anomaly or heuristic-based threat detection as well as antispyware capabilities.

Personal firewalls are another widely recognized countermeasure, although their effectiveness is limited to protecting at the network layer. Personal firewalls often cannot stop application layer attacks that utilize protocols and connections allowed by their rule base. Nevertheless, personal firewalls are a valuable component of managed endpoint protection as they permit only traffic that is explicitly allowed by policy.

Intrusion protection technologies offer another layer of security for managed endpoints. Host-based intrusion protection complements antivirus by guarding against unknown attacks that operate at the system and application levels. Network intrusion protection tools guard against network-based threats such as worms. While some network intrusion protection solutions rely on signatures and, therefore, guard against known attacks, other solutions provide more advanced mechanisms such as vulnerability-based signatures and protocol anomaly detection to keep unknown threats out.

Rounding out these more common security technologies are application control, host integrity checking, patch management, buffer overflow protection, and encryption technologies. Application control picks up where personal firewall technology leaves off and further defines allowable traffic. Host integrity checking evaluates various security attributes to ensure that the endpoint is defended against any threats it may encounter.

Patch management identifies and eradicates weaknesses in software code, while buffer overflow protection monitors endpoints for known and unknown threats that attempt to exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Finally, file and disk encryption guards against information loss in the event that an endpoint such as a laptop is stolen or lost.

Protecting unmanaged endpoints is also critical in order to reduce the risk of information exposure. However, because these devices are outside an organization’s control, they require “on-demand” protection that does not impose changes or restrictions beyond the duration of a specific interaction.

To that end, small businesses can leverage a number of on-demand technologies, including host integrity checking, cache cleaning, malicious code protection, firewalls, and a secure virtual workspace. On-demand host integrity checking and on-demand firewalls provide much the same protection as their agent-based counterparts, while on-demand cache cleaning removes information remnants from browsers and application-specific caches when a session ends.

On-demand malicious code protection leverages behavioral analysis techniques to identify keystroke loggers and other malicious code that may reside on an unmanaged endpoint. Further, on-demand secure virtual workspace technology guards against information leakage by creating an encrypted workspace on the unmanaged endpoint.

Of course, no information protection solution is effective without the cooperation of the people who actually use the managed and unmanaged endpoints. While business security responsibility and accountability is widely acknowledged as a vital yet challenging component of an information security strategy for any small business, its effectiveness can be greatly enhanced when organizations carefully codify requirements and responsibilities and apply automation to ease enforcement.

Although the days when just a firewall or antivirus provided adequate protection are long gone, small businesses have a wide range of tools from which to choose as they look beyond the network to protecting information regardless of where it resides at any given moment.

The convenience of doing business online inherently involves risk. The good news is that small businesses can conduct business online more safely by staying informed about the latest technologies required to protect their most vital asset—information. Together with enforceable employee best practices for security, small businesses can leverage technology to keep a handle not only on systems under their immediate control but also on the devices upon which their valued partners, employees, and customers rely to do business in a highly interconnected world.

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