Ransomware attacks have increased 73% year-over-year in 2023. With cybercriminals developing new threats daily, IT professionals are challenged with the pressure to keep their companies’ endpoints secure and also deal with the overwhelming noise from alerts and IT tickets.
These challenges facing IT professionals in small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) require comprehensive, ongoing protection against malware and advanced threats. That requires them to have both antivirus software with automatic threat blocking as well as sophisticated endpoint detection and response (EDR) software — and the key to a comprehensive defense is ensuring those softwares work seamlessly together.
Catching elusive threats takes an EDR tool built for SMBs’ needs
Research into data breaches found that the number of data compromises increased 78% year over year in 2023, rising from an already record-breaking high in 2022. SMBs’ digital transformation efforts over the last 5-10 years have made them more vulnerable to ransomware and cybersecurity threats, but their IT teams aren’t always well equipped to keep up.
“For a long time, a lot of IT teams at SMBs only used antivirus software, which stops anything it deems a threat,” says Austin O’Saben, Product Marketing Manager at Datto. “Endpoint detection and response (EDR) software, which catches suspicious behaviors, has become essential to protecting SMBs’ endpoints, but we’ve seen a mix [among SMBs] in how quickly they’re starting to adopt it.”
Combining antivirus and EDR software enables SMBs to not only detect and stop known ransomware threats, but also detect and respond to more elusive threats that traditional antiviruses tend not to catch — such as the fileless malware attacks that can hijack companies’ native software programs (and ultimately compromise their networks).
Combining antivirus and EDR software poses challenges for SMBs, however, because most EDR tools are designed to fit the needs and capabilities of larger companies.
“Small businesses need EDR protection, but haven’t had products built for them,” says O’Saben. “Large enterprises tend to have really large cybersecurity teams filled with seasoned experts, whereas small and medium sized companies tend to have multifunctional IT professionals handling a lot of duties at once. Tools meant for really mature companies don’t suit SMBs, because they’re not equipped to operate the same way.”
Alert fatigue leads to missed threats and high costs. In fact, missing a high-risk alert due to an ill-fitting EDR solution can cost IT professionals and others their jobs — with recent research finding that a third of companies that suffered ransomware attacks shut down temporarily or permanently within two years. Despite the risks, many SMBs continue to rely on solutions that inundate their IT professionals with alerts, making it harder for them to catch the important ones and ultimately weakening SMBs’ overall protections.
High-accuracy detection and streamlined workflows power smarter SMB protection
Strengthening SMBs’ overall protections — and minimizing alert fatigue issues for their IT teams — requires a combined antivirus-EDR solution designed to meet SMBs’ needs and capabilities.
A solution that both minimizes alert fatigue, automates routine maintenance, and provides 24/7 threat protection is Datto’s AV and EDR solutions. Datto’s combined antivirus-EDR solution minimizes the amount of noise SMB IT pros have to deal with by blocking all known threats automatically and providing behavior-driven security recommendations and alerts on the most critical indicators of cyber attack activities.
“Our EDR’s correlation engine assesses and detects threats based on its analyses of multiple behaviors happening at once — focusing on the 20 most critical behaviors associated with advanced threats,” says O’Saben. “This approach allows it to identify and detect threats with high accuracy, that doesn’t bog IT teams down in a sea of alerts.”
Datto’s combined antivirus-EDR solution detects and stops 99.62% of all malware threats (according to Miercom research). Its automated smart recommendations also ensure IT teams are informed on both the nature of every advanced threat and the expert-suggested actions they can take in response to them — helping teams through the mediation process by making sure IT professionals are never wondering what to do.
Integrations between Datto’s antivirus and EDR software also makes it easy for SMB IT teams to understand what’s going on across their full security landscape at any time.
“We prioritize allowing IT teams to work together and streamline workflows, which saves them time and stress,” says O’Saben. “You don’t want to be going to different dashboards or disparate solutions, because you’re going to lose some of the larger picture. With EDR and AV together, your solutions are not bumping heads at all, and you can see your overall picture in one view and respond when needed.”
Conclusion
Keeping SMBs’ networks secure and protected from advanced threats helps those businesses grow and thrive. But the systems that secure and protect SMBs need to be integrated, and easy for IT professionals to adopt and use, in order to be effective.
Datto offers SMBs a suite of integrated, reliable, and innovative enterprise-grade solutions — backed by industry-leading expertise — that can help IT teams improve their businesses’ security without causing alert fatigue.
To learn more about how Datto AV and Datto EDR have raised the standard for security download their Efficacy Report provided by Miercom, a global leader in security testing.