Darktrace's Justin Fier on Endpoint Security

One of the most obvious changes to the workplace wrought by the pandemic is the transition from a central office to a workforce that mainly works from home. Two years into it, "legacy security cannot be used anymore. We need to think a little bit differently," says Justin Fier, Darktrace's director of cyber intelligence and analysis.

The world of establishing a perimeter around the company network has given way to a distributed world of endpoints that have to connect back to the corporate network from outside.

"I'm sitting in my home office surrounded by IoT devices and other devices that may or may not be communicating or, at the minimum, on the same network with my endpoint," says Fier. "Usually, our endpoints were on the inside, and now there is no perimeter. So we have to look at protecting the endpoint in a different way."

What has changed with security measures as companies adapt to this new structure? Fier notes that some enterprises are becoming strict about workers logging in only via corporate VPNs. But that's not a complete or perfect solution.

"We've started to see some more browser-based security, as a lot of our customers are using more SaaS-related protocols," he adds. "Some are even migrating completely to Chrome OS and other browser-based operating systems. And that really changes the whole dynamic of using EDR [endpoint detection and response] solutions."

Looking into his crystal ball, Fier notes the expansion of zero trust and the evolution of network structure.

"I think the traditional endpoint will start to slowly go away," he says. "And you're going to start to see more and more creative ways to keep business operating with different tools that we might not have thought about in the enterprise in the past."

Note: DR Technology is sponsored by Darktrace.