Month: June 2020
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Things to Consider When Building "The New" Workplace Using Virtual Desktops
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Watch for Hidden Cost
The most common underestimated costs are WAN and backend storage. When introducing VDI, additional load will be placed on the network. VDI can heavily tax a WAN link, depending on number of users and type of applications that users are running.
Sizing and capacity planning are critical factors when creating a VDI environment. Engage with us to help you with with sizing your VDI environment.
Software Licensing Terms
Microsoft licensing is one key area that must be evaluated for VDI deployment, they have issued special licensing guidelines, the cost of the VDA license is included under your agreement.
Microsoft licensing is complex even without virtualization, engage solutions providers and have them assist you. Licensing may well be the most troublesome aspect of your VDI project but it is not rocket science with someone who have done it before guide you along.
Is Data Security A Key Concern?
Travelex paid hackers $6million ransom for its stolen 5Gbs customer personal data.
The immediate answer is “YES”, it is important to add another layer of protection for your data to ensure it will never leaves the data center, even with user scattered around the globe, that makes VDI worth it all by itself.
VDI not only can improve the security of data, corporate applications also can be siloed by leveraging multiple operating system instances or application virtualization. VDI in the data center manged by IT can be more reliably updated with antivirus signature files, patches and updates.
Subsription Based Model
Subscription-based models of Hyper-Converged infrastructure (HCI). Subscription-based model allows rapid deployment and configuration of the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) layer.
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Building The New Workplace
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Building The New Workplace
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Do you have this problems?!
Before you could continue reading this article, please ask yourself these questions;
- How do you empower your workforce now that they are all sitting at home?
- How do you minimize business disrupton
- How do you enable your workforce to access corporate resource remotely?
- How do you ensure the safety of your corporate data with your workforce 99% at home?
If these are the questions you or your organization is asking, the definition of workplace in the “The New Normal” has become a definition that everyone is trying to figure out what this exactly encompass.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDIs)
Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs): get “PCs” into the hands of your employees as if they are in office, get your remote workforce online in days not months, keep corporate data secured even though data is “exposed” into each of your workforce’s homes. If this resonates with your organization including this short list below:
Centralized management: to have a single pane of glass on all the devices in your organization
Quicker deployment of desktops: to be able to deploy desktops to users who are not in the office
Improved desktop security: to prevent data from being copied or leaked out
Improved business continuity and disaster recovery: that workers can still function and be productive from home
Migrate, upgrade, and patch the OS and applications with less downtime: especially when you do not get to see your users or the laptops/desktops in front of you
If you have all the checkboxes with WHY, then you are ready for HOW and WHAT needs to be considered before you jump on the bandwagon.
Employees to request to work from home
There are 5 groups of users which you will need to take care of before, during and after COVID-19.
- Current remote workers. They used to work remotely thus will require less attention as they would have been given the tools they required.
- Users who never work from home, but have corporate issued laptops. they probably have the right apps installed and meet the security requirements.
- Users who have never work from home (WFH) before, this is the “new” group which you have to decide whether to get them a corporate laptop, or use their own personal laptops.
- Users whose job cannot be done from home. For example, finance, book-keepers, sales operations etc.
- Users who will still come into office or store front. Less for IT/MIS to worry as they are traditionally not users of any IT equipment.
Now you can start considering the technologies that are available to meet the requirements of these personas. Now your ability to manage and troubleshoot user profiles will be a critical element to a good WFH strategy.
Does your organization have an existing virtual application or virtual desktop infrastructure
YES. If your organization has a VDI infrastructure, do you have sufficient licenses to cater additional 50-80% of your workforce having to WFH.
NO. But you can consider leveraging cloud elasticity and cloud burst across multi-cloud options.
User Experience and Expectations
The end user experience needs to be proactively managed and monitored to make sure the projected benefits of VDI result in more productive employees.
For the projects we have implemented, login times to be ½ a minute at a maximum in VDI environments, with 15-20 seconds considered average, and 5 seconds would be considered the holy grail of VDI.
BONUS
Considering VDI?
A good VDI readiness assessment will crawl your network in advance of your VDI project and deliver a report on where your problem areas are before you start. Fill out the form below and we will send you the assessment right away!
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Why Business Continuity Plans Must Start With Security
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Tony Jarvis,
Cybersecurity CTO &
Executive Advisor, APJ
Remote Access, a security nightmare!
Consider how many of us rushed to prepare for BCP to stop the spread of COVID-19, this threat has impacted our work differently than what most business continuity plans are prepared to handle.
With most of us working from home at the moment, there are certainly a number of challenges involved with keeping business operations running. Unfortunately, a growing number of cybercriminals are seeking to leverage the current situation for their own gain.
Since January, we have seen approximately 51,000 websites registered using words relating to ‘coronavirus’. 31,000 of these were registered in the last two weeks alone. What is concerning is that security researchers have identified 13,000 of these as being malicious. The simple act of visiting one of these sites could leave a laptop or smartphone vulnerable to attack.
Security researches have identified approximately 13,000 malicious websites registered using words relating to coronavirus.
Increasing number in ransomware
Ransomware is also on the increase. If such attacks are successful, the victim finds that their files have been encrypted, and is asked to pay a ransom in order to get that access back. One cybersecurity business has observed a 4,000% increase in ransomware emails within their clients, and a 53% increase in phishing emails.
More than anything else, we are seeing that criminals are using COVID-19 as a lure. They are preying on individuals by pretending to be from legitimate entities who might approach them at this time, or otherwise convincing users to click on things that they shouldn’t be.
Mobile devices are part of the problem. Researchers at Check Point Software Technologies have found 16 different malicious Android apps, all masquerading as legitimate Coronavirus apps. Should users download these apps, they could have their banking logins and passwords stolen, receive intrusive ads, or have automated calls made to premium numbers that get charged to the victim’s phone bill.
The larger lesson we need to learn from this pandemic, is that our BCP needs to be agile enough to handle the new norm.
Security challenge for remote work
It’s easy to understand why such an increase in attacks is being observed. For many organisations and individuals, this is new territory. Most organisations do a pretty good job of protecting the devices inside their premises, but today we have majority of the workforce working remotely. This presents different challenges that need to be addressed.
For example, most of those users working from home today are connecting directly to the Internet when they are surfing the web. Those searches are not being routed through the corporate gateways where security screening would usually take place. The result is that without proper protections on those endpoints, they are left vulnerable to attacks.
The larger lesson we need to learn from this pandemic, is that our BCP needs to be agile enough to handle the new norm.
Luckily, protections are available. Traditional antivirus solutions are not effective against today’s sophisticated threats. What is needed is a comprehensive set of protections against malicious websites, phishing attacks, ransomware, and advanced malware.
SandBlast Agent is a complete endpoint security solution offering a fleet of advanced endpoint threat prevention capabilities so you can safely navigate today’s threat landscape. The 2020 NSS Labs Advanced Endpoint Protection Test awarded it an ‘AA’ rating for blocking 100% of threats across multiple categories
For mobile devices, SandBlast Mobile offers enterprise mobile security that protects against threats to the OS, apps, and network. Leveraging Check Point’s best-of-breed threat prevention technology, SandBlast Mobile offers the highest threat catch rate in the industry without impacting device performance or user experience.
SandBlast Mobile was awarded an “AA” rating for blocking 100% of threats across multiple categories.
How do you protect organizations against unknown malware, zero-day threats and targeted attacks, and prevents infections from undiscovered exploits? Or rather, how do you protect against your own user’s behavior?
Download 2020 NSS Labs Check Point End Point Protection Report
What you will get in the report:
- Exploit protection rating
- Ability to detect false positives
- Resistance to threats using evasion techniques
- Effectiveness against malware
- Drive-by exploits from web browsing
- Protection against social exploits