Protecting data, maintaining compliance, and enabling the business is a balancing act. Put too many controls in place and you inhibit workflow. Rely exclusively on traditional security tools and you lack the visibility to detect and respond to advanced attacks quickly.

The industrialization of hacking has created an effective and efficient criminal economy. Attackers are fast and the malware they write and resell is smart, able to evade traditional defenses and quick to do damage. If attackers get through -and they will since there is no such thing as 100% breach prevention -IT security professionals need to be able to detect potential malicious activity as it happens, analyze it, and take action. And, increasingly, network-centric detection is not enough.

An explosion of new, untethered devices means that endpoints extend everywhere and so does the workplace you need to protect. Windows and Mac desktops and laptops, tablets and smartphones, and even smart watches make it possible to connect back to the corporate network anytime from anywhere. Attackers are taking advantage of this proliferation of endpoints and using gaps in security to drive their attacks home. Endpoint visibility is becoming a must-have.

To combat these more frequent and destructive attacks, you need to see beyond traditional indicators of a breach, like a signature or a hash or an IP address, to identify behavior-based activities that may point to malicious activities. This visibility must be on workstations so that you can track executables and processes across your environment and cut detection time down to minutes or seconds. You also need to maintain that visibility on devices connected to a protected network or roaming on public or personal in-home wi-fi.

Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints gives you the visibility and control you need to protect data, maintain compliance, and enable the business -everywhere workers may be. For example, the Prevalence capability in Cisco AMP displays files that have been executed across the organization ordered from lowest to highest number of instances. Files with low prevalence likely indicate a malicious executable you need to investigate. And because AMP is cloud-based you can continue to track devices and deliver the same level of protection whether devices are on or off the network.

Customers across a broad range of industries are using Cisco AMP for Endpoints to increase protection against today's elusive attacks. Listen to Tim McGuffin, Information Security Officer at Sam Houston State University, describe how his team used Cisco AMP for Endpoints to detect and respond to a malware attack disguised as bad user behavior, and how they maintain a secure infrastructure while ensuring academic freedom and research.