Moving from Anti-virus to AI led Cyber Protection with ESET

ESET have declared that on-premise licences are being demised in 2024 after several years of successful protection and replaced by new AI driven cloud-based licencing, designed to handle the latest cyber threat landscape which is becoming ever more complex.

As a leading MSP focussed on the Life Sciences sector Greenlight Computers have been a long-standing partner of ESET with over 15 years of successful deployment. We are delighted that ESET continue to offer leading edge threat protection solutions we can deploy to our clients.

The scope of the new ESET licencing is a big step forward and allows Greenlight Computers to answer many challenges identified in client audits using a single product in our cybersecurity stack, rather than having to find multiple vendor solutions.

The Transition Path

The new licencing is called ESET Protect Complete and replaces the old ESET Endpoint Protection. The table below emphasises the change of protection scope:

The major advances include:

• The move from Device hosted to Cloud hosted enables the use of the live AI threat response, all clients benefit from a centralised pool of threat protections that is continuously learning and protecting.
• Anti-phishing requires configuration but then blocks “similar domain” spoofing attempts. This is a big concern in Life Sciences as it is regarded as a wealthy sector and targeted regularly.
• Computer firewall blocks external attempts to access your computer when you are working on an unprotected network e.g. hotel, airport, conference or home. A key addition as we have all moved to a hybrid work profile.

Deployment

Deployment is largely automated when people are logged on to the internet a new agent is sent to the computer and replaces the existing version.

Certain modules e.g. the Anti-Phishing require pre-configuration that will be completed by the Greenlight Computers technical lead on your project.

The deployment cost will depend on the client device volume and configuration complexity and will be quoted for approval.

Vulnerability & Automated Patch Management switch on (optional 2^nd step)

Users currently have the responsibility for maintaining (patching to the latest version) the software on their computers. This is largely an automated process when the computer is shutdown each evening and restarted each morning.

However, there is a trend toward people not restarting and just shutting the lid, doing this creates risk!! Software if not patched properly will stay on the existing version and over time become a vulnerability (a way in) for hackers.

ESET have therefore added two modules to the ESET Protect Complete:

• Vulnerability Management – a method of identifying and reporting vulnerabilities.
• Automated Patching – where the user is prompted to do a restart or at a specific time (each week for example) the computer will automatically restart. This can be set to provide up to a 30 minute warning to allow users to save work etc.

As this is a significant change of policy for most businesses, we are proposing this as an optional next step.

Budgeting

There is no additional monthly licencing cost to switch on these modules but there is an additional monthly service cost of £7.00 per user per month for IT Support.

Deployment and configuration cost will depend on the scale of the client and will include optional training for users.

Timescales

ESET have advised that they need clients to move to the new protection standards by the End of June 2024.

Please contact your Greenlight Computers relationship manager for further details.