IT departments are under extreme pressure to roll out dynamic and scalable work-at-home environments as quickly as possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The timeline is “ASAP. Like yesterday” as Brian Madden and Shawn Bass humorously referred to in their recent article. But how do you provide WAH-ready endpoints for agents/employees “yesterday” without sacrificing security and control? The only way to achieve this is by using Secure Remote Worker on personal devices. In this post I will explain why this is.
Peter Corish
Implementing Work at Home? Security considerations for your virtual environment
With recent events we understand that business continuity is one of the things at the forefront of everyone’s mind, with more organizations closing their office locations temporarily and looking to implement home working as part of an overall business continuity plan. In virtual or remote environments, it’s tempting to think that you just need to provide your employees access through a browser or portal application for use at home and leave it at that, but this is not the case. When providing home working for your employees, security is obviously paramount, but one must also consider scalability, manageability, and of course, the end user experience. While it can be difficult to roll out corporate devices to the entire workforce, if you do decide to allow the use of personal devices then there are steps that can be taken to mitigate risk.
Securing your Windows 7 Devices
Windows 7 has been out of extended support for months, however, to no one’s surprise there are still a huge number of Windows 7 devices being utilized in the workplace across multiple industries, with around 25.6% of all devices are still running the operating system, Windows 7 is not going anywhere overnight. That is not to say people AREN’T moving however, the amount of reported Windows 7 devices are dropping at rates similar to XP. Environments are making the move to Windows 10, it’s just a much longer process than we give it credit for. So what exactly takes so long?
The issue is not with notice, we have known about EoL for a long time, the issue, as it often is with IT, is with prioritization. There are a lot of considerations and steps that go into upgrading an OS in a workplace and the idea of disrupting workflow and ignoring current “fires” to provision for what is (or was) seen as currently working fine is for many just was not a feasible undertaking.
Securing end users and endpoints with thin client computing
Drawing on my twenty plus years of working within end user computing, I can safely say that the weakest link in any end user computing environment when we talk about security, are the end users and the devices which they use. We talk a lot about securing the edge of the network, and for me, the edge of the network, when it comes to end user computing, stops squarely with the end users.
Best of Both Worlds: MDM & Secure Remote Worker for BYOD
BYOD is quickly becoming a valid and even preferred option in the workplace, with 85% of organisations implementing some form of BYOD. The efficiency that can be achieved with this trend is well documented and largely agreed upon. It’s found that employees work well on familiar devices, this stretches further than just the initial learning curve that … Read more
Secure Remote Worker’s Write Filter
Hi all, we are coming at you again with another blogpost, this time to let you know about our new feature for Secure Remote Worker, in our 6.0 release.
Built to provide a greater level of security and assist in achieving PCI, HIPAA and GDPR compliance, Secure Remote Worker’s write filter will allow for a clinical level of separation between the Secure Remote Worker session and end user’s personal machine. Thanks to the great effort of our dev team, Secure Remote Worker will allow you to utilize this write filter functionality on all personal Windows devices.
IntelliPerform: Filling the gap WSRM left behind
Introduction
VDI environments (whether you are running them yourself or an MSP hosting for multiple users) are implemented for their convenience, cost-effectiveness, and manageability, however, when providing a whole workforce all of their desktops and applications from one location, performance issues are bound to arise.
Resources in VDI environments are shared and often all it takes is one power user or one runaway process to severely impact the experience of everyone on a server. Even worse these can cause the server itself to crash.
In this post, I will discuss an approach that Windows took to resolve this issue on their 2008 – 2012 servers, what happened to that solution and how IntelliPerform can fill the gap it left behind AND more.
Happy Holidays from ThinScale Technology
Hanukkah Sameach, Happy Kwanzaa and Merry Christmas from the team at ThinScale Technology.
The ThinScale Management Platform—Complex use cases, made simple
In IT deployments, no two environments are exactly the same. Whether it be down to something as small as the drivers required to print or as broad as the use case itself, IT projects will always differ.