EDR vs traditional antivirus: what to buy with 40 employees
Honest comparison of capabilities, cost, and operations for 20–100 user Caribbean companies.
The question arrives weekly in San Juan consulting: "Do we need EDR or is the antivirus that comes with Microsoft enough?" The honest answer depends on data handled, regulation, and whether someone will review alerts. CISA places EDR in recommended controls for organizations with sensitive data; traditional antivirus only detects signature-known malware.
Traditional antivirus — even "enterprise" suites — blocks malicious files at entry. It does not correlate suspicious processes, detect living-off-the-land, or usually offer remote containment response. EDR adds telemetry, behavioral analysis, and isolation playbooks. For a 40-employee Guaynabo SMB with enterprise client data, the gap justifies the cost increase.
Operational comparison: antivirus needs near-zero staffing; EDR needs minimum weekly triage or an MSSP. If your IT is 1.5 people, EDR without managed service is accumulated noise. Krebs on Security reports incidents where EDR generated alerts ignored for weeks — tooling without process is theater.
PR cost for 50 endpoints: Defender for Business bundled in certain M365 plans vs CrowdStrike/SentinelOne at higher per-endpoint price but superior detection in independent tests. NIST CSF Detect function does not specify vendor; it specifies capability. Evaluate with a 30-day pilot in finance and IT.
Our recommendation: if you handle PHI, PCI, or contracts requiring incident response, EDR is baseline. If you only need compliance checkbox and accept residual risk, modern antivirus with MFA and tested backups may be an intermediate step — but document that decision for the board.
Operations and execution — connecting strategy with what the team ships every week.
