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A new survey on edge computing says remote working is leading to increased vulnerability.

A survey released this week says that nearly half of the endpoint devices corporations manage are at risk. The endpoints in question are unmonitored or outdated.

Endpoint management firm Adaptiva issued the survey, which was conducted by Ponemon Institute. The report says that despite the $4.25 million the average enterprise spends to protect endpoints, nearly half remain at risk.

The Managing Risks and Costs at the Edge report surveyed roughly 600 IT and cybersecurity professionals at organizations with an average of 13,213 employees and $184.3 million in annual IT spending.

“The world has been changing at unprecedented rates in the last two years, yet there haven’t been any significant innovations in the endpoint management space for over a decade, since the advent of cloud computing”, said Deepak Kumar, Founder and CEO of Adaptiva.

Lack of coordination

A big part of the problem is that the number of distribution points organizations use to update connected endpoint devices has grown as the workforce has become more distributed over the last two years.

The average enterprise now has one distribution point for every six connected devices and the average endpoint has seven different management and security agents installed, which complicates visibility and control.

Only one-third of respondents said their organizations are effective at reducing distribution point sprawl Of the 54% of organizations that suffered an average of five endpoint attacks over the past year, mean losses totalled $1.8 million, with downtime being the costliest factor.

A major take-away from the survey revealed a source of the vulnerability was lack of coordination between operations and security personnel. The survey found a “disconnect” between IT operations personnel responsible for monitoring endpoints and distributing updates, and the cybersecurity practitioners who dictate security policies and respond to incidents.

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