Why Isn't Endpoint Security Enough?

Just this week someone posed the question on Yahoo Answers, of whether endpoint security was really enough, and why was a web security proxy even needed. It's surprising to me how many people still think that end-point security is enough in this day and age. With web attacks being the primary vehicle for malware and spyware today, you'd think more IT administrators would want to proactive about their defenses against threats from the web.

While end-point security is one layer of security for web threats, it shouldn't be the only layer of defense. Why not? Well, the answer is rather simple, would you trust your end-user to do the right thing? What I mean by that is, do you trust your end-users to make sure their end-point security is up to date, has the latest patches, and downloads the latest definitions regularly. On top of that are you sure your end-users haven't found a way to disable their end-point security, because they found it annoyingly slow, blocked sites they wanted to visit or some other seemingly benign reason?

If you think your end-users are well-behaved, then I'm sure you're in the minority. For the rest of us, the web security proxy, adds another layer of defense for the paranoid IT administrator. It also provides some additional security layers that aren't typically found in end-point security software options. Some proxy vendors offer real time category ratings, cloud based information sharing of the latest threats, as well as the ability to scan all downloads for malware and spyware.

Many even let you pick the vendor whose anti-virus and anti-malware software your going to run on the proxy, enabling the IT administrator to select a different vendor than the one used on the end-point security client. This makes sure you've really got an added layer of defense so that when one vendor misses malware, you've at least got the chance the other vendor will catch it.

All these are good reasons to have secure web proxy, even when you've got end-point security.