Why You Might Consider Taking Your Security to the Edge

Any business that depends on its IT—in other words, most businesses—needs to consider the cybersecurity that is in place to protect it. Today, many businesses have started focusing their cybersecurity efforts on protecting their network from the edges, an approach that is fittingly known as edge security. Let’s take a moment to talk about the benefits that edge security can offer you.

How Does Edge Security Work?

Rather than centralizing your business’ security within your network, in your server, your defenses are focused at the endpoints. Most threats that your business will face would access your network through these endpoints, the outer fringes of your network. As such, establishing your security closer to the numerous devices on your network—the smartphones, workstations, and even IoT devices—can help significantly cut down on the risk of a network breach.

Why Would You Seek Out Edge Security?

The challenge that often presents itself where these devices are concerned is that there is far less security protecting many of them, especially compared to your business’ IT infrastructure, but they still often request network access. This makes them a prime target for attacks as a superhighway of sorts into your network.

What is Involved in Edge Security?

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to look at edge security as a simple reinforcement of the authentication practices that your business’ network should feature at its endpoints, protecting both the physical device itself and who can use it. This kind of access control is critical to modern security, and is all the more important when additional devices are introduced to the network. You need to know that authorized users are the only ones using them, and an edge security platform helps you to do so.

In addition to all this, encryption also plays a critical role in an edge security system. Encryption is key whenever data is in transit, which is more and more of the norm with today’s heavy use of cloud resources and distributed workforces. As a result, being able to encrypt this data is critical—even if it never actually comes into contact with your central infrastructure. Data can be encrypted both in transit and at rest, allowing it to be protected from unauthorized access at all times.

Edge Security Relies on Enhanced Monitoring

With any security platform, including an edge security platform, the capability to spot impending threats is critical. At Washington Works, we approach this by utilizing a central aspect of an edge computing platform: automated monitoring. If you don’t know that your business is under threat, you can’t really stop it. With today’s tools working independently to identify, quarantine, and ultimately eliminate threats to your security, edge monitoring helps prevent issues before they materialize.

Turn to Us for Assistance with Your Security, at the Edge and Beyond

We have the experience you want assisting you with your cybersecurity, helping to comprehensively defend your business’ infrastructure both centrally and at the edge of your network to mitigate the issues you would otherwise see. Find out more by giving us a call at 301-571-5040.