Advanced endpoint protection (AEP) products are designed to be the next evolution of endpoint security products and are purchased by enterprises to meet modern use case, security effectiveness, and threat visibility needs. Now that we are several years into the release of AEP products, it’s time to determine how AEP products are being adopted overall, and even more granularly, how they’re being adopted by enterprises of different sizes and industries.

For example, NSS’ 2017 Enterprise Architecture study found that of the industries that deploy AEP products, the highest deployment rates are among financial services (31.3%), banking (28.6%), hospitals and healthcare (24.5%), and manufacturing durables (21.7%).

Endpoint security product ownership is also interesting. As illustrated by the figure on the right, our data indicates that endpoint security products are predominately managed by security operations teams. Are these the same people who are orchestrating the purchase of these products? That is, do security operation teams influence purchases, specify purchases, or ultimately approve purchases?

This information, along with some unfiltered enterprise feedback, can be found in our Intelligence Brief on Endpoint Security Controls in the US Enterprise, which was recently published in the NSS Labs research library. (For more on the definition of AEP, its use case, and a side-by-side feature comparison for multiple AEP products, you can also take a look at NSS Labs’ 2017 AEP Product Selection Series, published earlier in 2017.)

The endpoint security product space is certainly exciting, and it’s clear that it will continue to evolve in an effort to produce higher detection and blocking capabilities, as well as deeper forensic data. NSS Labs is looking forward to continued evaluation of the product space and reporting on differences that help enterprise security teams understand the best fit for their environments.

NSS Labs has recently begun releasing a series of Intelligence Briefs that focus on security controls in the US enterprise. The series will report on security product usage as reported by 510 information security professionals representing 50 US industries. The brief on endpoint security in the US enterprise is now available in our research library.