What's the difference between antivirus and EDR?

Antivirus is traditional, signature-based protection that identifies malware by matching it against a database of known threat signatures. EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) is a more advanced, modern approach that adds behavioural analysis, continuous monitoring, and active response capability, catching threats antivirus alone would miss entirely.

How Traditional Antivirus Actually Works

Antivirus software maintains a database of known malware "signatures", essentially digital fingerprints of previously identified malicious files. When a file matches a known signature, it's blocked or quarantined. This approach works well against known, previously catalogued threats, but has an inherent blind spot: it can't recognise malware that's new, modified just enough to change its signature, or deliberately designed to evade signature-based detection, which describes a large and growing share of modern attacks.

Why Signature-Based Detection Alone Falls Short Today

Modern attackers routinely modify malware slightly for each deployment specifically to evade signature matching, and increasingly use "fileless" attack techniques that never write a traditional detectable file to disk at all, operating instead through legitimate system tools in ways signature-based antivirus was never designed to catch.

How EDR Closes This Gap

• Behavioural detection, rather than only matching known signatures, EDR watches for suspicious patterns of behaviour, a process suddenly attempting to encrypt large numbers of files rapidly, for instance, a classic ransomware behaviour, regardless of whether that specific malware variant has ever been seen before
• Continuous monitoring and recording, EDR maintains a detailed activity history on each device, enabling investigators to reconstruct exactly what happened during an incident, not just that "something" was blocked
• Active response capability, EDR can isolate a compromised device from the network remotely and immediately, containing an active threat rather than only detecting and logging it
• Centralised visibility, security teams can see activity and alerts across every managed device from one console, rather than each device's antivirus operating in isolation

Is Basic Antivirus Ever Still Adequate?

For extremely low-risk environments with minimal sensitive data and negligible attack surface, basic antivirus provides some baseline protection. But for any business handling client data, financial systems, or facing realistic targeted attack risk, and that describes most businesses operating today, the gap between signature-only antivirus and behavioural EDR represents genuine, exploitable risk, precisely the kind of gap modern ransomware is specifically designed to slip through.

The Response Side Matters as Much as Detection

A detection-only tool that flags a threat but requires someone to notice the alert and manually respond loses much of its value if that response takes hours. EDR's remote isolation capability, combined with active 24/7 monitoring watching for those alerts, is what turns detection into genuinely fast containment.

Our Approach

We deploy business-grade EDR as standard across every managed device, not basic signature antivirus, paired with 24/7 SOC monitoring so behavioural alerts get an immediate, expert response rather than sitting unreviewed in a dashboard nobody's watching.