Organizing and participating in trade shows, expos, conferences and other industry events is a great way for enterprises to position themselves as thought leaders while expanding their networks of channel partners. It’s also an opportunity for a business to demonstrate its newest solutions. Some vendors may even use this time to offer exclusive training courses for creative software suites.
The only problem, however, is that doing this means you’re suddenly responsible for hundreds or even thousands of computers and kiosks that are now in the hands of strangers. Any unwanted configuration drift occurring between demonstrations and pre-slotted tutorials, can throw off schedules if they aren’t reconfigured swiftly.
Use Case : Adobe Max Conference
Every year, Adobe Systems hosts its premier creative conference known as Adobe Max. Attendance ranks in the mid thousands, bringing photographers, graphic designers, film editors, videographers and hoards of other creative professionals onto a single site for three days of networking, learning and innovation.
In 2014, the estimated turnout was 5,300. As part of the program, Adobe offered training sessions for its creative software suite using 1,175 of its own company computers. As one might imagine, that’s a lot of systems to oversee and continually reconfigure after each tutorial or user session. The responsibility fell on Trevor Whitney, the IT Events Manager for Adobe Max.
His solution to the problem was to deploy Faronics Deep Freeze computer management software across his entire computing environment. Deep Freeze gave him and his team the ability to restore all of these systems after each and every session by triggering a remote restart of the fleet. Upon reboot, the systems were good as new, and ready for the next session.
Preventing Data Leaks and Intrusion
“Documents, or portals to these documents, are blockaded from public users.”
Prior to these events, it’s important that all and any sensitive documents, or portals to these documents, are blockaded from public users. To that end, Deep Freeze makes it easy for admins to control what drives and applications users have access to.
A less likely, but still possible, scenario is that a malicious individual will load a demo computer with ransomware using a thumb drive that does not immediately activate. Consider the example of KeRanger malware. Earlier this year, KeRanger became the first strain of ransomware that specifically targets Macs. One of its defining features was that it waited three days before executing after being installed onto the machine. Hypothetically, if a cybercriminal were to upload a strain with similar capabilities at a conference, by the time the ransomware executed, the affected machine might be connected to an enterprise network.
Fortunately, KeRanger was shut down. Nevertheless, the message here is fairly clear: It helps having solutions like Faronics Deep Freeze to restore the pristine state of computers, used at public conferences, trade shows and other events frequently. Primarily, to eliminate any potential configuration drift, or worse, dormant malware. Deep Freeze lets you ensure fresh systems for every session in multi-user environments, simplifying manageability and ensuring the success of such large scale events.
