Plenty of small businesses run on whatever antivirus shipped with the laptop. It feels like a solved problem — there’s a green tick in the corner. But the attacks that hurt businesses today were specifically engineered to walk past that green tick.
What traditional antivirus actually does
Classic AV matches files against a list of known-bad signatures. It still catches old commodity malware. But modern intrusions often use no malware file at all — stolen credentials, legitimate admin tools misused, scripts that live only in memory. Nothing on the list, nothing detected, green tick throughout.
What EDR does differently
- Watches behaviour, not just files: mass-encryption, credential dumping and abnormal admin activity get flagged whatever tool performs them.
- Records a flight-recorder history, so after an alert you can answer "what did they touch?" instead of guessing.
- Enables response: isolate a machine from the network in seconds, kill a process remotely, roll back changes.
- Feeds a human: EDR’s real power arrives when analysts (yours or a managed provider’s) watch it 24/7.
The market has already decided
Cyber-insurance questionnaires now ask for EDR by name, and many insurers surcharge or decline businesses running consumer AV. Enterprise customers ask the same question in supplier reviews. The price gap — a few dollars per device per month — has become the cheapest box you’ll ever tick, and the difference between finding out about an intrusion in minutes versus in the newspaper.
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