The business criticality and cyber-risk of endpoint devices could not be greater. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees rapidly shifted from a protected business work location to work from home (WFH). Post-pandemic, evidence points to WFH being more prominent than pre-pandemic. According to IDC's COVID-19 Impact on IT Spending Survey, respondents said that 6% of their employees worked from home prior to the pandemic. During the pandemic, that number jumped to 53% of employees; and, in 2021, respondents expect that 30% of employees will work from home. Yet, operating outside the guarded network of the enterprise, threat actors have escalated their attacks on end users and their devices; these actors knew from experience that compromising endpoint devices and manipulating human behaviors is their golden pathway to steal sensitive information, ransom business continuity, and divert funds (see Figure 1). IDC's research shows that the importance of endpoint security, already high, increased with the sudden WFH migration.
