View the comparison between an Anti-Virus and an EDR
Let's start by saying that EDR is beginning to be a requirement in the eyes of insurers, meaning that without this solution, you are putting the company at risk and the client data which will then raise insurance rates.
You might have one of the following antivirus brand solutions being sold:
- Bitdefender.
- Norton.
- Kaspersky.
- ESET.
- Webroot.
- Avast.
- McAfee.
- Trend Micro.
They might be a great solution in your eyes but are in fact inferior to EDR solutions, we've broken it down to the little pieces.
AV protects customers against malware and does require regular definition (virus signature) updates.
Which means that the protection being offered by the software is only as good as the vendor's most recent updates...which also requires the user to update the definitions manually, where we tend to forget.
New threats arise daily, and ensuring updates get pushed out in a timely fashion would be the best scenario.
AV solutions only protect against viruses and malicious software.
However, there are more threats to endpoints than viruses. For starters, attackers increasingly use file-less attacks that simply can’t be caught by AV programs.
Plus, cyber criminals increasingly use evasion techniques to slip past AV. For instance,
cyber criminals often use packers to encrypt malware and make them hard to detect or develop
malware that changes its signature on a set cadence to avoid detection based on the existing
virus signature database.
You cannot run both EDR & AV at the same time:
AV and EDR compete for resources, so running the two at the same time can cause problems.
For that reason, we don’t recommend using both AV and EDR on a given endpoint.
Antivirus can be perceived as a part of the EDR system.
It’s best to choose one or the other for each endpoint.
When deciding between the two, it’s important to consider several factors, including the type
of business in need of protection, the end users, and cost.
Some customers may need one or the other for their entire user base.
Others may want to strategically deploy EDR for some users while using AV for the rest of their employees.
EDR not only includes antivirus, but it also contains many security tools like firewalls, whitelisting tools, monitoring tools, etc. to provide comprehensive protection against digital threats.
Disadvantages of Antivirus:
- Antivirus can’t protect against everything.
- It can slow down your computer.
- It can be expensive to maintain.
- It can generate false positives (warnings about threats that aren’t present).
- It can miss new threats that haven’t been identified yet.
- It can be difficult to configure and manage.
- It can create security holes if not properly configured.
- It requires regular updates to stay effective.
- It can be disabled or bypassed by malware.
- It can give you a false sense of security.
The biggest and most important disadvantage is that antivirus will only catch known threats.
Detection of all Endpoint Threats
One of the biggest benefits of using EDR security systems is their ability to detect all endpoint threats.
It provides you visibility on all of the endpoints of your digital perimeter.
It is superior to the traditional antivirus or other tools which use signature-based or perimeter-based solutions in terms of identifying potential threats.
It can help you understand the nature of potential attacks better and prepare the appropriate response for the same.
Provides Real-Time Response
EDR solutions can provide real-time responses to different potential threats.
You can see the potential attacks and threats as they are evolving in the network environments and can monitor them in real time.
This real-time response feature of EDR solutions is very useful and can cut off the attack in its initial stages only before it becomes critical for the network.
You can spot suspicious and unauthorized activities on your network and can get to the root cause of the threat, thereby enabling a better response from you.
