It seems that every few months, another prominent global brand experiences a major security breach and the negative public exposure causes serious damage to their reputation. It’s enough to keep business owners and security professionals worried that they are also exposed — be it through an overlooked vulnerability, baked into their device, or an unknown weakness in their software. You might be able to trust your IT team to secure your networks and implement data-safe practices, but how can you trust all the endpoints and applications you rely on to do business when you had no oversight throughout their manufacture or development? Dell, Microsoft and Intel know that the only way to reliably secure business devices and networks is through a harmonization of hardware and software security technologies. While our teams have worked together to create a chainmail of closely integrated hardware and software security capabilities, other providers may not have made this investment.

A common yet flawed approach to address device integrity is attempting to create a false sense of security through softwareonly solutions without addressing underlying hardware-based vulnerabilities. It is important for business leaders to understand the limitations of this strategy. By relying only on software to protect their businesses, they leave the hardware that the software is running on potentially vulnerable to attacks. In essence, if hardware isn’t secure, security applications and technologies running on it cannot be secure either.