 |
There are 10 reasons to strengthen security protection with app and desktop virtualization, along these lines;
1. Workplace mobility and flexibility support-
Today’s enterprise workforce, mobility is fundamental. A growing number of people often works at customers or partner locations, at homes, on the road and in other workplaces outside of their offices. Wherever these people work and no longer bound to office desks, their productivity now rest on the ability to access apps and data, as well as share information, collaborate or join meetings, anywhere and at any time. Flexwork is becoming a key enterprise approach as organizations are moving jobs to different resources, times, and locations to ensure it is done at the right time, in the right place and by the right people. Moreover, flexwork can incorporate everything from desk-sharing programs and teleworking to transfer of business processes or even entire departments. Visible benefits gained from these are growths in productivity and business operations continuity, in addition to a reduced real estate, labor costs and travel expenses.
Granular access control policies and centralized application and data management only allow authorized users to connect to enterprise resources, and at a moment’s notice, IT can grant secure access to anyone towards a specific set of resources and can modify or terminate access as quickly. A user can utilize any type of device in accessing virtual Windows applications and desktops with no need of IT to put together individual endpoints, a key benefit when endpoints in questions are at the user’s home, at another business or on the other side of the world. In general, app and desktops virtualization are transforming mobility and flexwork programs uncomplicated, quicker to implement, less expensive and more secure thus the organization can understand the maximum worth of this strategy.
2. The benefits of saying “yes” to consumerization –
Whether people brought a laptop of their choosing into the office, working offsite on a tablet or responding to business needs via smartphone while in transit, consumerization is an enormous advantage for both these people and the organizations. A consumer device bought by the organization and owned by an individual employee, connected with instantly accessible high-speed links around the world, have considerably improved the skill-set of people doing their works in the most expedient, productive means possible. However, these strategies greatly complicate the security system for IT. Knowingly, different devices have diverse types of security programs or nothing at all; and many well-liked devices don’t even support antivirus, firewalls or other legacy control methods. So, for IT to properly protect business data, it needs a method to securely divorce it from personal data on consumer-grade mobile devices.
App and desktop virtualization releases IT from the overwhelming likelihood of handling security right through an extremely comprehensive gamut of user devices. It aids in preventing data from inhabiting on endpoints devices by centrally regulating data in the data center. Windows apps and desktops are being provided to the endpoint device only in virtualized form, remotely from any personal data or apps on the device and cannot be moved out of the centrally controlled data store. Albeit, the personal content on a device is infected with a virus, the containerized virtual desktop minimalizes the effect of the virus on business resources.
 |
Intellectual Property (IP) is often a company’s most valuable asset | Source: https://www.score.org/
|
3. Ensuring data privacy, data loss prevention and protection of intellectual property-
Prevention of data loss and intellectual property protection are not the only thing that IT must do, nevertheless, also ensure the privacy of data and customer confidentiality, honoring contractual commitments and maintaining compliance. In aiming at optimum productivity and speed to market, organizations must give collaborative access to intellectual property and sensitive data all throughout the value and the supply chain. Contractors, partners, suppliers and other concern third parties need to access and share apps and data with the organization’s staff to keep it running smoothly at peak performance, but devoid of being accorded unrestricted rein behind the firewall.
Rather than worrying about data being saved on a removable media such as USB flash drives, emailed between users, printed out or otherwise exposed to loss or theft, IT can ably set policies in controlling users’ ability to copy, print, save or otherwise transfer data across a focal point of administration. In centralizing the data center’s resources, apps and desktop virtualization allow IT to control and secure Windows apps and allied data more easily and effectively in a single location instead of thousands of different locations throughout the organization and beyond.
4. Maintaining global compliance -
Because of its minute ability to control the delivery of sensitive data and a lack of session-specific data location, IT has struggled a lot with complying trans-border requirements. Complying national and transnational laws, industry regulations and organizational policies is both a growing encumbrance and a moving target. Applications of a complete set of controls to data usage processes are exaggeratedly restricting. Applying a minuscule set of controls may bound to fail to map the organization’s very own unique security requirements and threat tolerance.
App and desktop virtualization enables a centralized granular policy control to help IT stop dealing with compliance and data privacy in a reactive behavior and instead lets the development of the correct data security policy for the organization’s business requirements and threat profile. One single set of policies can rule whether users can add applications, access peripherals, copy data, and perform such other actions, contingent on locations and other factors.
5. Contractors empowerment –
Currently, organizations are making bigger use of contractors, consultants, offshoring resources, outsourcing partners, temporary workers, and other contingent workers. Though contracting can boost flexibility and efficiency, it also presents similar challenges for IT such as, easily and quickly providing workforces need and de-provisioning just as effectually as soon as the employment is over not to mention the devices used by the contractors which are in effect problematic as well. Letting contractors use their own devices can really diminish the costs, but there is no any assurance that these devices can run all the functions of the apps needed for the type of work engaged. Virtualized apps and desktops have provided a solution to both problems. Windows apps and desktop that were considered necessary by the contractors and similarly those situated on the other side of the globe, could be provisioned and de-provisioned instantaneously from a single, main location of the administration. Apps and desktops virtualization can be provided to any type of device, whether owned by the contractor, a business partner or the organization, or even to those devices leased for a project. Subsequent engagement, access to resources can be instantly turned off, devoid of apps or data being left behind on the device.
 |
Source: http://thenextweb.com/socialforbusiness/2014/11/11/tightening-social-media-security/
|
6. Increasing the security investments’ value –
Trying to find a way in managing tens of thousands of individual endpoint devices is extremely challenging and time-intensive undertakings that lead to unavoidable delays and omissions in putting into operation the latest security platforms. As a matter of fact, studies showed a devastating percentage of successful attacks took advantage of a formerly identified susceptibility for which a patch or a protected configuration benchmark was already available.
Through maintenance centralization, virtualized app and desktop streamlines and speed up endpoint protection. Antivirus updates, hotfixes and patches can be swiftly installed atop a single master image before deploying all throughout the organization. IT can then focus more effectively on anything that matters most, specifically, the protection of data in the data center and reacting swiftly to fresh security requirements.
7. Safeguarding data and operations during a disaster or other business-related disruption –
Whether planned or unplanned, man-made or natural in scope, a business disruption can be a period of immeasurable vulnerability on behalf of an organization because commonplace practices changes, people are accessing apps and information in novel ways, and perimeter security or endpoint security measures are in danger of being compromised.
Virtualized app and desktop provides the methodology to business continuity including both the data center and the people who were dependent on it. Once a disaster befalls, organizations need to make sure that not only that the data and apps remain protected, but that the business likewise operates as normally as possible to evade damage to the organization’s reputation, financial shortfalls, the customer being neglected, lost productivity, strain partner relationships, and other resulting consequences.
Centralized resources support a policy that automatically moves people from the primary data center to the secondary data center swiftly and transparently so that they can continue the work. In the meantime, IT can concentrate on safeguarding Windows apps and data hosted in the data center, and on provisioning, securing, and controlling access to the resources instead of managing local apps and data on a countless of user devices in the organization. Endpoints devices that cannot be secured anymore, such as laptops left behind during an evacuation, hold no information in a serviceable form. More, IT can simply turn off any access to virtual Windows apps and desktops. In the meantime, those people working temporarily in offices or at home can keep on accessing virtual apps and desktops by making use of any accessible device, minus the need to transfer data via USB flash drive or email.
8. Minimizing the impact of data security breaches –
There’s no strategy ever that can guarantee a flawless data security in perpetuity. Being competent to restrict the devastation brought about because of any security breaches that do arise is just one fundamental part of risk management. Management centralization enables IT to take fast action in the event of a security breach or misconfiguration errors. When it happens, the very first defense approach is by using virtualization in isolating sensitive applications and data and run both on a user privilege accounts exclusively than a user-controlled device, thereby cutting down the influence of the breach of a single component. The second line of defense if ever the device gets infected, is resetting the image by means of virtualization on device reboot.
As a fitting example of this scenario is a rogue PDF file would only influence the functionality of a virtualized reader’s PDF and would have no access to the Windows file system and registry as it would do in a non-virtualized system. Similarly, browsers can be isolated and protected from causing extensive damage due to a compromised system. If a user’s integrity is being compromised, for instance in a zero-attack, IT can swiftly take that user’s environs offline and reinstate it to an uncompromised state by retrogressing to a golden image. Along with installed security measures put into effect on every virtual system, harmful attacks are thus averted from spreading to all other systems in the environment and IT can bring much needed up-to-date access policies throughout the environment at a moment’s notice.
9. Supporting fast business development –
A very complex, allocated security model can significantly delay time to value as IT labors in securing each user’s endpoint as soon as organizations develop current locations or merge operations, open new branches or acquire another company. Virtualized desktop provides the ability in extending the organization’s current security model to new locations, people and groups swiftly, simply and economically. It also streamlines remote branch and office management in many ways such as localize lockdown, high availability, and rapid setup, enabling all IT to give instant access to virtual desktops without the need for network integration. As fast-growing organizations resort to flexible work modes such as influencing contractors, outsourcing, and teleworking to scale down operations, organizations can provide safe application and desktop access to any kind of worker in any locality on any device minus being constrained by an inefficient and inflexible security model, all the while keeping tightfisted control over how and where precisely data is being accessed.
10. Getting security out-of-the-way of users –
Typically, security has been put into effect at the expense of users. They have been permitted to work in limited spaces, relying on usual business equipment, have minimal access to resources, sacrificing mobility and spending progressively more time in authenticating systems and passwords managing. As a riposte, even the very faithful employee can take on an antagonistic perspective of security and search for methods to sidestep or undermine the rules, such as reproducing data on a prohibited USB flash drive to work back home, installing unofficial applications, disregarding policies on network access, and using personal devices and applications without restraint.
Virtualized desktop upturned this model: instead of dealing with never-ending specifics of endpoint security, users will simply sign on just once to a virtual desktop with the user’s virtual applications, provided on-demand wherever that user want to work, on a device of the user’s choosing, and they are free to perform their work as IT runs security mainly in the data center. Procedural policies are stated by IT and automatically put into effect, irrespective of the user or access control. The aptitude to perform a work anywhere using consumer devices or even bringing their personal device betters the productivity and satisfaction of an employee, all at the same time as minimizing the risk of a security infringement.
Conclusion
The organization can facilitate secure access and cooperation for each employee, contractor or partner while granting the true level of access founded on a user device, profile, network or location. The strong and forceful benefits of desktop virtualization have by now become an apex agenda item for a good number of IT organizations.