Endpoint protection is hitting a serious bottleneck as cyberattacks accelerate. Traditional endpoint protection platforms (EPP)-the widespread first line of defense for workstations, servers, and laptops-handle routine threats fairly well but struggle against targeted advanced persistent threats (APTs). While EDR systems integrated into Security Operations Centers (SOCs) can detect and respond to such attacks, deploying them requires significant personnel, processes, infrastructure, and budget that many companies-even large ones-simply lack.
This mismatch has split the endpoint security market sharply. According to N4A Analytics, over 80% of protected endpoints rely on basic EPP setups. About 20% benefit from full-featured systems linked into SOC environments. Between these groups lies a vast segment of organizations that find ”just antivirus” insufficient but cannot afford their own security monitoring center.
The problem is becoming urgent because attacks have gotten much faster. Where complex campaigns used to drag on for days, some now unfold in under an hour. In that time, attackers can compromise a device, entrench themselves across the network, corrupt data, and even delete backups. If security teams respond hours later, any endpoint tool-even a decent one-ends up delivering nothing more than stale telemetry.
Why endpoint protection is hitting a ceiling in cybersecurity
The biggest barrier today isn’t just software licensing costs. Total cost of ownership involves deployment, maintenance, scenario tuning, system integration, hiring analysts, and incident response workflows. For many businesses, this becomes close to building a full SOC, and many stop short of that investment.
On the technical front, full EDR suites are resource-heavy-they demand solid computational power, reliable infrastructure, and centralized management. On weaker hardware, such as budget thin clients, these tools struggle. This leads customers to keep only basic defenses on endpoints and push complex analysis to central systems. This dynamic also fuels growing interest in Extended Detection and Response (XDR), where threat decisions factor in data from multiple sources, not just a single machine.
Modern attackers increasingly avoid ”classic viruses,” instead infiltrating networks via stolen credentials, malicious attachments, or built-in OS tools. These moves mimic normal user activity, making detection tricky. If users have excessive privileges, devices aren’t centrally controlled, and isolation takes too long, detection alone doesn’t stop the damage.
Globally, the trend mirrors this shift. Research from IDC and Gartner shows demand for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and similar managed services is growing faster than traditional endpoint products. Clients want not just capabilities but operational security delivered as a service. Russia reflects this too, with companies increasingly favoring security monitoring, incident triage, and response support over piecemeal tools and licenses.
Success metrics have shifted accordingly. Previously, endpoint security was assessed by coverage-how many endpoints were protected, how many agents deployed. Today, what matters is how quickly teams detect real threats, confirm incidents, isolate compromised devices, and begin remediation. Western analysts emphasize MTTD and MTTR-mean time to detect and respond-as key metrics. When attacks unfold in minutes, these are not academic benchmarks but measures of actual risk and loss.
The shift from product licenses to action-based security services
This evolving landscape is pushing the market from selling products toward selling the ability to act. Evgeny Podmarev, head of Kaspersky competence center at Softline Solutions (part of the Russian IT group Softline), notes steady growth in service models, especially among midsize businesses that struggle to run their own SOCs. However, he cautions that pay-per-attack pricing models remain premature, as cybersecurity outcomes are hard to quantify neatly.
The challenge is defining what counts as an attack, how incident resolution is verified, the limits of provider responsibility, and handling false positives. Pick the wrong metric, and vendors can game results by tweaking detector sensitivity, artificially inflating performance on paper but not in reality.
Maxim Kharask, development director at Cyberlimf (UDV Group), echoes this view. The market accepts monitoring, alerting, and response services with clear responsibilities more comfortably than abstract ”pay per attack” schemes. For him, time to response-the duration between identifying a real threat and taking containment and remediation steps-is the critical success indicator.
Effectively, clients are buying a chain of actions rather than just EPP or EDR licenses:
- Event collection and normalization
- Incident analysis and prioritization
- Isolation of infected endpoints
- Recovery and root cause investigation
Behavioral analytics and User Behavior Analytics (UBA) are rising in importance because many attacks use compromised credentials or legitimate admin tools after initial endpoint entry. Classic EPP or even EDR can struggle to distinguish malicious activity hiding behind normal user behavior. Context-aware systems that relate actions to user profiles represent the logical next layer.
Artificial intelligence accelerates this evolution on both sides. Attackers use AI for faster code generation, exploiting more attack vectors, and automating lateral movement. Defenders leverage large language models and AI agents to quickly analyze telemetry, correlate events across EDR, SIEM, XDR, and network monitoring, and relieve analysts of routine tasks. Vendors like Microsoft, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto Networks have long positioned AI as an integrated enhancement. Russia’s cybersecurity market is following suit, adapting AI to local needs.
The key takeaway for customers is practical: don’t just check for antivirus, EDR, or SOC presence. Assess the entire threat response timeline-from first alert to decisive action. If a company detects a threat but cannot swiftly verify the incident, disconnect infected nodes, and determine attacker movements, endpoint security is effectively a cosmetic layer. On a growing market, that might have gone unnoticed. But with attacks now compressed into minutes, this shortcoming becomes dangerously apparent.
According to N4A Analytics, the endpoint security segment is forecast to grow around 7% annually through 2026. This growth is respectable but no longer driven by basic license sales alone. The next phase will favor hybrid solutions between ”barebones” EPP and costly SOCs-more automated, service-oriented, and measured by minutes to respond rather than agent counts.