The IT security threat landscape has become more and more difficult for businesses to deal with. Threat vectors are getting more sophisticated and targeting weak points with precision. Increased technical complexity is leading to a wide range of insider threats, as users can inadvertently subvert policies and best practices without even knowing it. What’s more, a simple, small human error can lead to large data breaches due to a minor configuration change. There are a variety of factors contributing to the complexity of endpoint management, but one underlying question connects all of them : Do IT departments have the optimal visibility or control over their operating environments?
Visibility Matters
For smart endpoint management, IT teams need to be able to control the endpoint configurations, because users nowadays work with multiple devices. With more companies offering branch locations, remote work and similar strategies, the typical enterprise user may hop between a few laptops, desktop PCs and mobile devices on a regular basis. Throw in the high levels of turnaround in today’s business climate, and you’re looking at an extremely fluid device landscape.
On top of all this, a few select trends are shifting the power dynamic in technology decision-making. These include:
- The consumerization of IT A movement in which business users expect consumer-like access to services, effectively giving them freedom to jump between devices and applications based on their preferences.
- Shadow IT With cloud computing’s rise, many organizations give business managers the authority to subscribe to apps and oversee those licenses, leading to departmental silos, and a disconnect between the technology being purchased, and what IT is aware of.
What Level of Control is Necessary?
These trends create a situation in which IT has been asked to cede control in some strategic areas of operations, and the result is a new need for visibility. Because tech professionals can’t simply set systems up and leave them be, knowing that all changes will be made by IT, they must be able to quickly view and adjust any endpoint that has gone through a change and return the solution to a safe, secure operating configuration.
The importance of this level of control is particularly notable when it comes to insider threats. Help Net Security reported that many businesses consider malicious users actively using their employee access to steal data as the only insider threats. However, with IT complexity and consumerization on the rise, businesses must treat every user as a potential insider threat. For example, a worker could send a third-party partner data that is relevant to a project, only to do so through a public network portal that makes that data viewable by anybody else on the network. Users need a regulated VPN to get around, but that’s now another solution on the endpoint that will need to be managed and configured. Protecting against insider threats hinges on knowing how user devices are set up, how they are being used and how they are changed at any given time.
InfoSecurity Magazine pointed out that multilayered approaches to endpoint management and security are absolutely critical as they can go beyond simply responding to threats and help organizations establish a framework to provide holistic data protection across the configuration.
Deep Freeze Cloud for Optimal Visibility and Total Control
You don’t have to sacrifice endpoint control just because you give users a degree of freedom. Instead, the Deep Freeze Cloud solution allows you to maintain endpoint persistence so that, if a problematic change is ever made, users can simply reboot the computer and restore it to a known working state. In practice, the platform simplified endpoint management by letting you:
- Enable persistent configurations to ensure control over standardized OS setups, so that unexpected changes don’t halt operations.
- Automatically wipe unauthorized software from computers with a reboot, facilitating license compliance.
- Instantly clear any malware, including zero-day threats, as restoring to the golden state eliminates any malicious changes.
- Automate maintenance schedules to ensure you are always ahead of updates and timely maintenance.
- Dramatically reduce the support burden on the IT teams : Deep Freeze customers experience an average of 63 percent decline in the number of help desk tickets, by enabling self-healing in endpoints.
- Allow for rapidly self-addressal of mundane system issues, allowing users to focus on getting the job done.
- Gain insights into usage behaviour, to identify potential insider threats and optimize resource usage.
- Centralize and streamline management of policy creation, deployment and management across workstations.
- Gain control of your IT asset inventory through intelligent reports and dynamic widgets to make smart IT decisions.
- Centralize and streamline management of policy creation, deployment and management across workstations.
As these capabilities work together in the background, they set a foundation for clear control of and visibility into endpoints. Because each device is configured optimally at the outset by IT, and unexpected changes become quickly obvious because of its impact on the rest of the system. From there, IT personnel can connect with users to restore the system to the pristine state before any problems escalate. All of this happens quickly with a reboot, providing the convenience end users need, alongside the control IT requires.
Learn more about Deep Freeze Cloud’s capabilities, or contact us today to learn more.
