Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Jeremy Moskowitz, founder and CTO, PolicyPak

Securing your Standards

As companies evolve their business through digital transformation, data becomes ever more important, and the companies that do the best job of extracting value from data will outpace their competition.

Cryptomining Attacks Will Increase

Cryptocurrency is an alternate, decentralized currency that is digital and independent of any government or country. It is supported by a technology called blockchain which is a public ledger that records transactions between two parties in an efficient, verifiable, and permanent manner. These blockchains are created by "miners" that use powerful computer systems to solve computationally intensive mathematical tasks, such as the recording and verifying of cryptocurrency transactions.

Cryptomining requires a great deal of processing power to perform the calculations. But instead of hackers buying their own racks of equipment to do the work, they just use yours-processing power and your electricity. Of course, a single client device has nowhere near the capacity to reasonably mine cryptocurrency, but through the collective effort of millions of devices, miners are quite profitable.

Client devices are transformed into mining prospects by two primary methods. The first is cryptocurrency-mining malware. According to Kaspersky Labs, 1.6 million of their customers' computers were infected by cryptocurrency-mining malware last year. Two common delivery methods for this type of malware are 1) email phishing attacks and 2) the exploitation of the EternalBlue Windows vulnerability that was made famous in the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks. In 2019, cryptomining attacks will become more prevalent.

The Year for Windows 10

2019 is the year for Windows 10. With Windows 7 support ending in January of 2020, businesses need to get going. The numbers are already strong for Windows 10, but they'll get stronger. The problem though is that businesses will (still) have trouble keeping up with the cadence of releases for Windows 10. Businesses in 2017 and 2018 with Windows 10 have signaled, by and large, they don't like the twice a year upgrade cadence and Windows 10 version end-of-life policies. I cannot foretell if Microsoft will (once again) change their upgrade cadence and Windows 10 version end-of-life policies, but it's possible Microsoft could agree to a less aggressive required upgrade cadence.

Some wins for MDM start to emerge: getting automatically configured and Autopilot

Customers are seeing the light of the idea of "buy it at BestBuy" or "drop ship it from Dell" and having the machine connect to the network and get configured. MDM might have more wins, but I think the shining star for 2019 will be some organizations which get MDM configured enough with Autopilot to demonstrate a big base-hit win with MDM, with Autopilot being "Score #1" on the board.

Organizations still using on-prem as they investigate cloud options

2019 is not the year to turn off the lights on domain controllers, SCCM, Group Policy, or on-prem File or Print Servers. It's just not. Start to see offerings and scenarios which augment on-prem infrastructure with cloud equivalents, and organizations continue to stay entrenched in on-prem infrastructure and investigate cloud offerings which augment this on-prem infrastructure for mobile machines and roaming users.

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About the Author

Jeremy Moskowitz founded PolicyPak Software after working with hundreds of customers with the same problem: they couldn't manage their applications, browsers and operating systems using the technology they already utilized. Jeremy's best-selling Group Policy books are on the desks of happy administrators everywhere. Jeremy holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Delaware, was one of the first MCSEs in the world, and has been designated an MVP in Group Policy by Microsoft for over a decade.