No technology is without its risks, but at the same time, any risk can be mitigated. Risk mitigation requires operational discipline built on visibility, control, and repeatable processes. When done well, it helps organizations reduce exposure, respond faster to risk, and make more informed operational decisions.
However, the growth of remote and hybrid work and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies has led to a greater number of distributed endpoints, which can be harder to protect. When combined with the increased threat of faster exploit cycles and the confusion of tool sprawl, risk mitigation is harder than ever.
Fortunately, it’s still possible to take a practical approach to risk mitigation and reduce risks without adding complexity. With that in mind, let’s explore the challenges of modern risk mitigation, where most programs fail, and how tools like Splashtop AEM can help.
What Risk Mitigation Means in Modern IT Environments
First, we need to understand what modern risk mitigation looks like. In today’s business environments, risk mitigation focuses on reducing the likelihood and impact of operational and security risks by improving visibility, enforcing controls, and applying repeatable actions across systems and endpoints.
Risk mitigation goes beyond just identifying risks; it’s easy to see when a fire is a danger, but putting it out is another thing altogether. Once a risk is identified, IT and security teams must implement tools and strategies to address the threat and ensure security.
In today’s remote and endpoint-heavy environments, traditional risk mitigation controls and strategies may not be as effective as they once were. Modern risk mitigation requires a new set of tools designed for today’s threats and work environments, so businesses can effectively address threats and keep their risks low.
The Most Common Risk Mitigation Gaps IT Teams Face
Before we can address the common shortcomings of traditional risk mitigation strategies, we must understand what they are. While older risk mitigation techniques worked well for their time, technological advancements have made them less reliable, leaving several blind spots.
Common risk mitigation gaps include:
Limited visibility into endpoints, software, and configuration drift, which prevents IT and security teams from identifying vulnerabilities or potential issues.
Delayed patching and remediation cycles, which result in extended periods of vulnerabilities being left exposed.
Overreliance on point-in-time audits, which capture only single moments rather than providing ongoing, real-time visibility, allowing attackers to move unnoticed between those snapshots.
Manual processes that do not scale, which make it difficult to manage multiple distributed endpoints.
Fragmented tools across security and IT operations, which fail to provide a holistic view of a company’s security and make it difficult for IT agents to properly protect and manage everything.
Why Traditional Risk Mitigation Approaches Break Down
Given these risk mitigation gaps, it’s easy to see why traditional strategies can’t hold up anymore. Older, outdated approaches fail to provide the visibility, policy enforcement, and speed that modern risk mitigation requires, leaving significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
1. Risk Identification Without Continuous Visibility
Moment-in-time scans and asset inventories are outdated the moment they’re completed, as they fail to capture a comprehensive, ongoing view of your security posture, and may be run too late to matter. Continuous visibility is essential for identifying threats in real-time so they can be addressed immediately.
Ongoing visibility can make the difference between missing a risk, knowing it existed at one point, and knowing if it still exists. If you’re only getting a snapshot of a single moment, you’re not getting the full picture.
2. Policies Without Enforcement or Feedback Loops
Security policies alone aren’t enough to mitigate risks. You need to be able to execute and enforce your security policies, and verify that they’re working as intended.
This includes training and testing employees on how to prevent phishing, enforcing patching policies across your endpoints with a patch management solution, and using endpoint management solutions that provide continuous visibility, automated remediation, and verification that policies are actually enforced. Doing so will help enforce ongoing security and maintain consistent cybersecurity.
3. Manual Remediation That Cannot Keep Up
Manually remediating threats and vulnerabilities is a time-consuming process that simply can’t scale to keep up with the growing businesses and remote work environments. Attempting to manage each device one at a time creates multiple delays, yields inconsistent results, and is prone to human error, especially when remote endpoints are involved.
What Effective Risk Mitigation Looks Like in Practice
If traditional risk mitigation strategies are inefficient, then we have to ask: what does efficient risk mitigation look like? Proper, modern risk mitigation strategies provide consistent threat identification and management in several ways, and should:
Maintain continuous visibility across endpoints and software to identify threats and vulnerabilities in real time, enabling quick remediation.
Prioritize risks based on exploitability and exposure, not just severity, to provide a more accurate and efficient threat management.
Automate remediation wherever possible to streamline and improve efficiency without requiring manual labor.
Validate outcomes with real-time status and reporting that ensure security and maintain audit-readiness.
Repeat continuously, not quarterly, in order to maintain consistent threat detection and mitigation and reduce exposure windows.
How Endpoint Management Supports Risk Mitigation
One of the most efficient ways to mitigate risks across distributed and remote environments is with a good endpoint management solution. Endpoint management enables IT teams and administrators to monitor, support, and protect remote devices from anywhere, allowing them to enforce security and detect threats with ease.
Endpoint management includes:
1. Visibility as the Foundation for Risk Mitigation
Visibility is the most essential element for identifying and mitigating risks. After all, you can’t protect against what you can’t see. Visibility into endpoints and software helps reduce blind spots, enabling IT teams to identify threats quickly and proactively address risks before they become a problem.
2. Automation as a Risk Reduction Mechanism
Manually addressing risks, vulnerabilities, and other issues can be a lengthy process, and there’s always a chance of human error. Automation, on the other hand, shortens the exposure windows by efficiently identifying and addressing threats, deploying patch updates across endpoints, and monitoring devices for potential issues. This provides a fast, consistent mitigation process, keeping devices secure while freeing IT teams to focus on more pressing tasks.
3. Control and Verification Over Assumptions
Once you remediate an issue, you need to know with certainty that it’s been resolved. When solutions lack visibility and verification, you have to assume it’s been properly resolved, which is unreliable at best. An endpoint management solution provides the robust controls and verification features that let IT teams know when their work is done, complete with clear records for audits to demonstrate IT compliance.
How Splashtop AEM Fits Into a Risk Mitigation Strategy
Endpoint management is a powerful tool for risk mitigation, and Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management) delivers robust, user-friendly capabilities for businesses of all sizes. With Splashtop AEM, IT teams can manage remote devices from a single dashboard, gaining clear insights into all their endpoints along with real-time OS and third-party patching and continuous visibility into endpoint risk exposure.
1. Using Splashtop AEM to Reduce Endpoint Risk Exposure
Splashtop AEM provides visibility into your endpoints and automation tools, making management more efficient. This includes real-time patch management to keep devices up to date, threat detection and awareness based on CVE data, and context-based insights into each endpoint. These features alleviate the pressure on IT teams while providing real-time patching and continuous awareness of vulnerability exposure to reduce risk across endpoints.
2. Automating Remediation Without Adding Tool Sprawl
Risk mitigation and threat remediation shouldn’t involve complex manual workflows and multiple disparate tools. Splashtop AEM provides everything you need in one place, helping IT teams efficiently detect threats, automate remediation, and deploy patches to address vulnerabilities.
3. Supporting Risk Mitigation for Teams Using Intune or Manual Processes
Whether you use Microsoft Intune to patch your Microsoft OS and apps or manually patch your endpoints, Splashtop AEM can help. Splashtop AEM provides automated patch management across operating systems and third-party applications, filling in Intune’s blind spots and removing the need for teams to manually patch every application and endpoint. This provides full patch coverage and improves efficiency, seamlessly supplementing your existing processes.
Measuring Whether Your Risk Mitigation Efforts Are Working
When you change up your risk mitigation strategies, how can you be sure the changes are working? There are several factors and metrics you can monitor to track and identify improvements, including:
Reduction in time-to-remediate vulnerabilities: How long does it take you to address a vulnerability? If your risk mitigation efforts are working as intended, you’ll be able to address potential threats more quickly and with less hassle.
Fewer unknown or unmanaged endpoints: Unknown, unmanaged, and unprotected endpoints pose significant security risks. Proper endpoint management should reduce the number of these devices as unknown endpoints become known and previously unmanaged devices are secured.
Improved patch compliance visibility: Patch compliance visibility serves two purposes: it lets IT teams know their endpoints and applications are all properly patched, and it creates clear records for compliance audits. If you can tell more easily which of your endpoints are secure and can pass audits efficiently, your risk mitigation is paying off.
Faster response to newly disclosed risks: How quickly can your team respond to new risks? With proper risk mitigation strategies, you’ll be able to swiftly address new threats, so if your response time is improving, your strategies are working.
Bringing Risk Mitigation Into Day-to-Day IT Operations
Effective risk mitigation is a continuous process that requires ongoing visibility, threat detection, and patch management. Episodic check-ins, point-in-time scans, and regularly scheduled update cycles are no longer sufficient for protecting networks and devices, so risk mitigation strategies must evolve to address modern threats.
Visibility, automation, and control are essential for proper risk mitigation and form the backbone of sustainable operational practices that can provide consistent, ongoing protection. However, risk mitigation only succeeds when it’s embedded into daily IT workflows.
If distributed environments and limited visibility are holding back your risk mitigation strategies, Splashtop AEM can help. With Splashtop AEM, you can easily monitor and manage remote devices, BYOD endpoints, and more, all from a single place. This includes real-time threat detection with CVE-based insights and patch automation, so you can quickly address risks as soon as they appear.
Splashtop AEM gives IT teams the tools and technology they need to monitor endpoints, proactively address issues, and reduce their workloads. This includes:
Automated patching for OS, third-party, and custom apps.
AI-powered CVE-based vulnerability insights.
Customizable policy frameworks that can be enforced throughout your network.
Hardware and software inventory tracking and management across all endpoints.
Alerts and remediation to automatically resolve issues before they become problems.
Background actions to access tools like task managers and device managers without interrupting users.
Ready to see how easy endpoint management and risk mitigation can be? Get started with a free trial of Splashtop AEM today.
