
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.