Bring Your Own Device policies were adopted by enterprise IT organizations under pressure from employees and leadership who wanted to use their personal devices for work and did not want to carry two phones. The policies were designed hastily, implemented with tools that were not ready for the management requirements they needed to meet, and left in place with minimal review as the security landscape changed around them. The result is a policy category that most IT security professionals acknowledge as a significant exposure and most organizations decline to address because addressing it requires telling employees they cannot use their personal devices for work.

Endpoint Detection and Response platforms replaced antivirus as the dominant endpoint security technology on the basis that signature-based detection could not keep pace with the volume and variety of modern malware. The replacement was justified. EDR’s behavioral detection, continuous telemetry, and forensic capability represent a genuine improvement over signature-based antivirus in detecting and investigating endpoint threats.

The marketing that followed — the promise of comprehensive endpoint security that would significantly reduce breach frequency and impact — overstated what the technology can deliver. EDR is better than what it replaced. It is not the endpoint security solution. Endpoints continue to be compromised at scale in organizations running mature EDR deployments because the threats that matter most have adapted to operate within the behavioral envelope that EDR considers legitimate.