October 2025
Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) tools are often seen as the backbone of modern cybersecurity. They provide deep visibility into laptops, servers, and workstations, detecting malicious activity where users and applications interact.
But here’s the hard truth: EDR alone isn’t enough. While it provides critical endpoint visibility, it misses a vast and increasingly exploited part of the infrastructure - the lateral movement between systems.
For executives, this means a simple but uncomfortable reality: even with strong EDR, your business may still be blind to key threats.
Blind to East-West Traffic
EDR tools monitor what happens on individual endpoints, but they don’t see how attackers move laterally across the network. Once an attacker slips past the perimeter, they can quietly pivot between systems without tripping endpoint alarms.
Hybrid Complexity
In modern environments with on-prem data centres, cloud workloads, containers, and IoT/OT devices, not every system can support an EDR agent. These unmonitored devices create gaps that attackers exploit.
Reactive by Design
EDR typically catches threats once malicious activity is underway on a host. By then, lateral movement may already be in progress, making remediation slower and more costly.
Regulatory pressure: Standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and Zero Trust mandates demand proactive detection - not just endpoint monitoring.
Financial impact: Breaches that move laterally cost more to contain, disrupt operations more broadly, and often impact multiple business functions.
Reputation risk: Customers and investors expect resilience. A breach that spreads unchecked due to EDR blind spots undermines confidence.
False assurance: Heavy investment in EDR without complementary visibility creates a dangerous illusion of safety.
In short, EDR-only strategies leave businesses exposed to the very attacks that cause the most damage.
The answer isn’t abandoning EDR - it’s extending it with deep observability to cover the areas EDR can’t reach.
With network-derived intelligence complementing EDR, organisations gain:
Full east-west visibility: Detect suspicious lateral traffic that endpoints miss.
Early threat detection: Spot anomalies in network flows before they land on endpoints.
Unified coverage: Extend security to hybrid, cloud, and unmanaged devices without deploying agents everywhere.
Proactive defence: Shift from reacting to endpoint alerts to proactively identifying attacker movement across the network.
With Matrium Technologies and partners like Gigamon, organisations can bridge the gap between endpoint and network visibility — turning two siloed views into one cohesive security posture.
EDR is critical - but it’s not a silver bullet. Attackers know how to exploit the blind spots between endpoints, moving laterally to compromise multiple systems and evade detection.
For executives, the priority is clear: don’t rely on EDR alone. To protect your business, you need visibility across the endpoint and the network.
By complementing EDR with deep observability, organisations can close the blind spots, reduce attacker dwell time, and ensure that security investments truly deliver resilience, compliance, and peace of mind.