There is no getting away from the fact that passwords are still the cornerstone of modern cybersecurity practices. Despite decades of advice to users to always pick strong and unique passwords for each of their online accounts, Keeper Security found that only one-quarter of survey respondents actually do this. Many use repeat variations of the same password (34%) or still admit to using simple passwords to secure their online accounts (30%). Perhaps more worryingly, almost half (44%) of those who claimed all their passwords were well-managed also said they used repeated variations of them. One in five also admitted to knowing they’ve had at least one password involved in a data breach or available on the dark web.

At first glance, these results may come as a shock, especially to those in the cybersecurity industry who have been touting these simple best practices for years. However, when considering more than one in three people (35%) globally admit to feeling overwhelmed when it comes to taking action to improve their cybersecurity, and one in ten admit to neglecting password management altogether, the results are much less of a surprise.

Cybersecurity is a priority and cybersecurity solutions must also be. The threat landscape continues to expand as our lives shift from in-person banks, stores, and coffee shops to online banking, internet shopping, social networking, and everything in between. We have never been more dependent on our phones, computers, and connected devices, yet we are overconfident in our ability to protect them and willfully ignoring the actions we must take to do so. Perhaps we need more people to admit they’re as careless as a bull in a china shop, burying their heads in the sand like an ostrich or simply paralyzed with fear. Facing reality and coming to recognize what’s at stake, they can more confidently charge forward and take the necessary steps to protect their information, identities and online accounts.

Organizations running today’s modern Windows desktop/workspace environments, face challenges in dynamically delivering  applications while minimizing base image management.

Liquidware, with its solutions and expertise, offers a comprehensive approach to help companies navigate each integral phase of a Windows Application Strategy. This whitepaper discusses the challenges of delivering applications in physical or cloud-based Windows workspaces and explores an “Assess, Prepare, Deploy” application strategy methodology.

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is arguably the most common identity and access management platform in today’s enterprise and as a result, a prime target for cyber-attacks. Microsoft Active Directory is used in approximately 90% of the Global Fortune 1000 companies as the primary means of authentication and authorization to resources. This statistical picture holds true in the SMB market as well. As a result, most organizations today use Active Directory to implement their password security and password policies.

Active Directory, by default, contains the ability to create basic password policies. Are these enough to protect your organization from attackers? In this comprehensive guide we look at five ways to strengthen your existing Active Directory Password Policy and explore additional solutions available to ensure complete confidence in your first line of defense.

Let's look closer at native Active Directory password settings and see which settings are found in the default password policies businesses use with Active Directory. Download the whitepaper to learn the five ways to strengthen your Active Directory Password Policy.

Remote and hybrid work environments mean IT Service Desks have a new set of complex challenges to navigate while maintaining a trusted level of security. Navigate the IT service desk in a remote & hybrid work environment more efficiently.

We examine the common driver for Service Desk tickets including network access, cached credentials workarounds, and password resets. All of which can present unique cyber-security challenges that require change for increased efficiency, productivity and security.

Download the whitepaper to learn what the Specops Software cybersecurity team recommends increasing efficiency without sacrificing security.

Ransomware is a problem that everyone has but no one wants to talk about publicly.

1,200 IT leaders from organizations of all sizes were surveyed by an independent research firm to better understand what happened when they were attacked and what did they learn to prevent future events. Learn how business and IT leaders addressed these issues:

• Be relentless with security
• Limit your risk exposure
• Recovery is everything

You will also discover how you can:

Quickly Create adaptive and customized M&A workspace

IT teams can quickly set up a branded Liquit Workspace integrated with existing workspaces for a single user interface on the front end while enabling fast individual and group user customization via the back end. This enables you to meet changing user application and platform needs during and after M&A.

Quickly adapt to application user needs

Take application provisioning, updating, and versioning from hours to minutes for hundreds of users, along with access to thousands of curated applications to deliver merging workforce productivity. 

Unify application access provisioning

Eliminate the nightmare of access provisioning across varied on-premises and cloud environments for thousands of users in minutes rather than hours without uprooting native SSO and IAM that are constantly in flux during and after M&A.

Dramatically reduce cost and time expenditures

Eliminate collaboration and communication bottlenecks across on-premises, VDI platforms and clouds while freeing IT time for bigger M&A integration projects and lowering licensing and IT costs.

Research finds PAM solutions are too complex with 68% of organizations paying for “wasted features” that are rarely used. A global survey of 400 IT and security executives conducted in January 2023, by Keeper Security in partnership with TrendCandy Research, reveals an overwhelming industry desire for Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions that are easy to deploy and maintain.

The findings show that traditional PAM solutions are falling far short, largely because they are too complex to implement and use. An overwhelming 84% of IT leaders said they want to simplify their PAM solution in 2023. In the current high-risk security climate, it is imperative that all organizations secure their privileged credentials, privileged accounts, and privileged sessions to protect their crown jewels. However, many traditional PAM solutions are failing to provide their intended value outside of these core use cases, because deployment is either too complex, too cost-prohibitive, or both. In the era of remote work, organizations need agile identity security solutions that can protect against cybersecurity threat vectors by monitoring, detecting, and preventing unauthorized privileged access to critical resources.

Keeper Security, a leading innovator in privileged access management, wanted to better understand how IT leaders are thinking about PAM, deploying their PAM solutions, and streamlining their PAM implementations. Keeper commissioned an independent research firm to survey 400 IT and data security leaders in North America and Europe about their strategies and plans for PAM in 2023.

The True Cost of Disruption is Massive.

When measuring the total cost of downtime, immediate service disruption is only the beginning. In a landscape of evolving threats, comprehensive protection is more important than ever for modern digital businesses. Traditional backup solutions no longer meet the needs of today’s businesses for disaster recovery. 

However, not every organization has the means to build their own datacenter or hire full-time DR specialists. Even for those that can, there are still benefits to replacing the direct and indirect costs of secondary sites with a predictable monthly expense for a specialized service.

For many organizations, DRaaS is an ideal solution. Our DRaaS 101 eBook describes in detail the benefits of DRaaS and the wide variety of models available through Zerto’s DRaaS providers—including an option that’s right for you.
Download this DRaaS 101 eBook now—it’s free!

• Hybrid- and multi‑cloud realities and their implication on data protection and security strategies
• Critical insights into the protection and security of cloud‑hosted virtual machines (VMs), databases and file shares, including SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365
• The role of BaaS and DRaaS offerings, ranging from “self‑managed” to “white glove”
• And More!

Prioritizing Mobile Application Security

Despite the increase of cyberattacks targeting mobile applications, most organizations neglect, or deprioritize mobile application security until it’s too late. The coverage of high-profile breaches and security incidents involving mobile apps in the news tells us that mobile app security should be a high priority in every organization’s broader security strategy. Failing to properly secure your mobile apps can result in the following:

●    Financial loss
●    Reputational damage
●    Customer data loss
●    IP theft
●    And more

This whitepaper shows organizations how to prioritize mobile app security by focusing on building better relationships between development and security teams. This resource also provides a history and overview of software development and steps that an organization can follow to build a concrete strategy to strengthen their overall mobile app security posture.

Download the full report here.

Welcome to the IGEL Software Platform: Step-by-Step Getting Started Guide. My goal for this project is to provide you with the tools, knowledge, and understanding to download the IGEL Platform trial software and perform basic installation and configuration without being forced to read many manuals and numerous web support articles.

This document will walk you, step-by-step, through what is required for you to get up and running in a proof-of-concept or lab scenario. When finished, you will have a fully working IGEL End-Point Management Platform consisting of the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS), IGEL Cloud Gateway (ICG) and at least one IGEL OS installed, connected and centrally managed! 

Print data is generally unencrypted and almost always contains personal, proprietary or sensitive information. Even a simple print request sent from an employee may potentially pose a high security risk for an organization if not adequately monitored and managed. To put it bluntly, the printing processes that are repeated countless times every day at many organizations are great ways for proprietary data to end up in the wrong hands.

Mitigating this risk, however, should not impact the workforce flexibility and productivity print-anywhere capabilities deliver. Organizations seek to adopt print solutions that satisfy government-mandated regulations for protecting end users and that protect proprietary organizational data — all while providing a first-class desktop and application experience for users.

This solution guide outlines some of the regulatory issues any business faces when it prints sensitive material. It discusses how a Citrix-IGEL-ThinPrint bundled solution meets regulation criteria such as HIPAA standards and the EU’s soon-to-be-enacted General Data Protection Regulations without diminishing user convenience and productivity.

Finally, this guide provides high-level directions and recommendations for the deployment of the bundled solution.

Rethink Your Ransomware Resilience and Disaster Recovery Strategy

Ransomware attacks are on the rise and the ability to detect when an attack has begun is critical to the ability to recover quickly. Attackers are constantly evolving their attack methods and traditional backup and recovery technologies simply can’t detect encryption quickly enough.

This free Gorilla Guide outlines the dangers of ransomware, the impacts to organizations, and the need to detect attacks as they are occurring in real-time. This Gorilla Guide topics include:

-    The growing threat of ransomware
-    Challenges of traditional data protection solutions
-    Comparing solutions
-    Real-time ransomware detection & recovery
-    Zerto as an all-in-one CDP solution

Understanding how early detection can help mitigate a ransomware attack and allow recovery more quickly is vital to any ransomware resilience strategy. Don’t become a victim of delayed ransomware detection by relying on periodic backup solutions.
Download the free Gorilla Guide now to get informed!

Many large enterprises are moving important applications from traditional physical servers to virtualized environments, such as VMware vSphere in order to take advantage of key benefits such as configuration flexibility, data and application mobility, and efficient use of IT resources.

Realizing these benefits with business critical applications, such as SQL Server or SAP can pose several challenges. Because these applications need high availability and disaster recovery protection, the move to a virtual environment can mean adding cost and complexity and limiting the use of important VMware features. This paper explains these challenges and highlights six key facts you should know about HA protection in VMware vSphere environments that can save you money.

SaaS applications like Microsoft 365 can benefit an organization in a number of ways — but they can also pose the risk of data loss. Even though Microsoft hosts the infrastructure, this doesn't replace your responsibility to back up business‑critical Microsoft 365 data.

This technical review from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) documents the results of a detailed evaluation of Veeam® Backup for Microsoft 365, including validating granular backup management capabilities and agile recovery options.

• Technical review from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group
• In‑depth look into Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 capabilities
• Why you should consider Veeam for your Microsoft 365 backup solution

There are many new challenges, and reasons, to migrate workloads to the cloud.

For example, here are four of the most popular:

• Analytics and Machine learning (ML) are everywhere. Once you have your data in a cloud platform like Google Cloud Platform, you can leverage their APIs to run analytics and ML on everything.
• Kubernetes is powerful and scalable, but transitioning legacy apps to Kubernetes can be daunting.
• SAP HANA is a secret weapon. With high mem instances in the double digit TeraBytes migrating SAP to a cloud platform is easier than ever.
• Serverless is the future for application development. With CloudSQL, Big Query, and all the other serverless solutions, cloud platforms like GCP are well positioned to be the easiest platform for app development.
  

Whether it is for backup, disaster recovery, or production in the cloud, you should be able to leverage the cloud platform to solve your technology challenges. In this step-by-step guide, we outline how GCP is positioned to be one of the easiest cloud platforms for app development. And, the critical role data protection as-as-service (DPaaS) can play.

The primary goal of a multi-cloud data management strategy is to supply data, either via copying or moving data to the various multi-cloud use cases. A key enabler of this movement is the data management software applications. In theory, data protection applications can perform both of the copy and move functions. A key consideration is how the multi-cloud data management experience is unified. In most cases, data protection applications ignore the user experience of each cloud and use their proprietary interface as the unifying entity, which increases complexity.

There are a variety of reasons organizations may want to leverage multiple clouds. The first use case is to use public cloud storage as a backup mirror to an on-premises data protection process. Using public cloud storage as a backup mirror enables the organization to automatically off-site data. It also sets up many of the more advanced use cases.

Another use case is using the cloud for disaster recovery.

Another use case is “Lift and Shift,” which means the organization wants to run the application in the cloud natively. Initial steps in the “lift and shift” use case are similar to Dev/Test, but now the workload is storing unique data in the cloud.

Multi-cloud is a reality now for most organizations and managing the movement of data between these clouds is critical.

There are a number of limitations today keeping organizations from not only lifting and shifting from one cloud to another but also migrating across clouds. Organizations need the flexibility to leverage multiple clouds and move applications and workloads around freely, whether for data reuse or for disaster recovery. This is where the HYCU Protégé platform comes in. HYCU Protégé is positioned as a complete multi-cloud data protection and disaster recovery-as-a-service solution. It includes a number of capabilities that make it relevant and notable compared with other approaches in the market:

• It was designed for multi-cloud environments, with a “built-for-purpose” approach to each workload and environment, leveraging APIs and platform expertise.
• It is designed as a one-to-many cross-cloud disaster recovery topology rather than a one-to-one cloud or similarly limited topology.
• It is designed for the IT generalist. It’s easy to use, it includes dynamic provisioning on-premises and in the cloud, and it can be deployed without impacting production systems. In other words, no need to manually install hypervisors or agents.
• It is application-aware and will automatically discover and configure applications. Additionally, it supports distributed applications with shared storage. 

Troubleshooting complex IT problems can consume your organization’s financial and physical resources. To combat this, you need an observability solution capable of providing end-to-end visibility for proactive troubleshooting.

SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability is the answer. Powered by AIOps and machine learning (ML), Hybrid Cloud Observability delivers a simple, powerful, and secure full-stack observability solution built for hybrid IT environments of all sizes.

This whitepaper shows how Hybrid Cloud Observability delivers a powerful way to accelerate root cause identification and remediation through AIOps. It discusses the many benefits of integrating and optimizing the solution’s features and explains why Hybrid Cloud Observability is ideal for those looking to get the most out of their observability journey.

To learn more about Hybrid Cloud Observability and how it can help drive growth, read the whitepaper.

While VMware Horizon provides a powerful virtualization platform, technologies and capabilities like Microsoft Windows, Active Directory, authentication, DNS, network, group policy, and third-party apps must work seamlessly to provide a great digital employee experience. This eBook will focus on improving the logon duration for EUC and VDI deployments.

And view this solution page for more information. 

Many organizations have turned to virtualizing user endpoints to help reduce capital and operational expenses while increasing security. This is especially true within healthcare, where hospitals, clinics, and urgent care centers seek to offer the best possible patient outcomes while adhering to a variety of mandated patient security and information privacy requirements.

With the movement of desktops and applications into the secure data center or cloud, the need for reliable printing of documents, some very sensitive in nature, remains a constant that can be challenging when desktops are virtual but the printing process remains physical. Directing print jobs to the correct printer with the correct physical access rights in the correct location while ensuring compliance with key healthcare mandates like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is critical.

Healthcare IT needs to keep pace with these requirements and the ongoing printing demands of healthcare. Medical professionals need to print effortlessly and reliably to nearby or appropriate printers within virtual environments, and PrinterLogic and IGEL can help make that an easy, reliable process—all while efficiently maintaining the protection of confidential patient information. By combining PrinterLogic’s enterprise print management software with centrally managed direct IP printing and IGEL’s software-defined thin client endpoint management, healthcare organizations can:

• Reduce capital and operational costs
• Support virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and electronic medical records (EMR) systems effectively
• Centralize and simplify print management
• Add an essential layer of security from the target printer all the way to the network edge
  

SolarWinds® Observability is a SaaS offering built from the bottom up as a cloud-native service organization can deploy into AWS or Azure data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia, offered via a modular subscription model with licensing flexibility.

SolarWinds Observability provides observability across the entire IT technology ecosystem, illuminating the digital user experience and integrating with service management applications for automated issue remediation.

ESG states, “These capabilities allow companies to fully embrace a cloud-native architecture without the risk of harming the end-user experience. [It] uncovers problems quickly so they can be resolved right away, providing a stable environment for cloud-native applications to provide business value.”

Virtualizing Windows applications and desktops in the data center or cloud has compelling security, mobility and management benefits, but delivering real-time voice and video in a virtual environment is a challenge. A poorly optimized implementation can increase costs and compromise user experience. Server scalability and bandwidth efficiency may be less than optimal, and audio-video quality may be degraded.

Enabling voice and video with a bundled solution in an existing Citrix environment delivers clearer and crisper voice and video than legacy phone systems. This solution guide describes how Sennheiser headsets combine with Citrix infrastructure and IGEL endpoints to provide a better, more secure user experience. It also describes how to deploy the bundled Citrix-Sennheiser-IGEL solution.

From resource stagnation/shortages to the new “distributed enterprise,” IT service management (ITSM) is evolving. And while supporting users efficiently is more challenging than ever, this situation also presents a unique opportunity to lean more into smart technologies like automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Learn more today by downloading our whitepaper, “The Future of IT Service Management with AI.”

We will take you through the evolution of smart tech, including where it stands today and where it can drive the future for your service delivery, including:

• What happens when linear processes no longer bind service management
• Where the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework fits into the equation
• Why AI is not what scary sci-fi has led you to believe
• How to move forward with a measured, strategic approach

Your virtual machines are at the heart of all that your business does, hosting practically any workload. So make sure you have the best recovery methods and data protection strategies in place to ensure maximum business continuity with this FREE E‑book. Here’s what’s covered inside:

• Explore VMware backup tools and components
• How to implement VMware backup
• Understand levels of backup consistency
• Five tips for better virtual machine backup
  

GET E-BOOK

• Deliver the user experience on any device and make the process simple for users and IT alike.
• Lighten the load for your IT team by creating a unified workspace for a simple environment that’s easier and faster to manage.
• Automate cleanup of end users’ workspaces and synchronize applications with the latest versions, all without disrupting end-user productivity.
• Enable anywhere operations using your preferred cloud — on-premises, public, or hybrid.
  

In this guide you will learn about Disaster Recovery planning with Zerto and its impact on business continuity.

In today’s always-on, information-driven business environment, business continuity depends completely on IT infrastructures that are up and running 24/7. Being prepared for any data related disaster – whether natural or man-made – is key to avoiding costly downtime and data loss.

-    The cost and business impact of downtime and data loss can be immense
-    See how to greatly mitigate downtime and data loss with proper DR planning, while achieving RTO’s of minutes and RPO’s of seconds
-    Data loss is not only caused by natural disasters, power outages, hardware failure and user errors, but more and more by man-made disasters such as software problems and cyber security attacks
-    Zerto’s DR solutions are applicable for both on-premise and cloud (DRaaS) virtual environments
-    Having a plan and process in place will help you mitigate the impact of an outage on your business

Download this guide to gain insights into the challenges, needs, strategies, and solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity, especially in modern, virtualized environments and the public cloud.

The author of this Pathfinder report is Mike Fratto, a Senior Research Analyst on the Applied Infrastructure & DevOps team at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Pathfinder reports navigate decision-makers through the issues surrounding a specific technology or business case, explore the business value of adoption, and recommend the range of considerations and concrete next steps in the decision-making process.

This report explores the following topics:

• the growth of already commonplace cloud usage for mission-critical applications
• the importance of cloud governance
• the top cloud security concerns for enterprises
• the adoption of third-party tools for cloud management
• the steps IT teams should take to make their cloud environments more secure and reliable

Vladimir Galabov, Director, Cloud and Data Center Research, and Rik Turner, Principal Analyst, Emerging Technologies, are the co-authors of this eBook from Omdia, a data, research, and consulting business that offers expert analysis and strategic insight to empower decision-making surrounding new technologies.

This eBook covers the following topics:

• the current landscape of cloud computing, including the BIG problems
• the advantages of using a multi-cloud approach
• the dangers of shadow IT, including billing surprises and security breaches
• the move of mission-critical applications to the cloud
• the considerations regarding cloud security, including recommendations for IT teams

Application hardening is an important part of mobile app security, and yet, it can feel like a difficult concept to grasp.

Developers often struggle to get hand-on knowledge and experience working with hardening techniques. In this technical magazine, Guardquare’s engineers have created a set of four fun, practical labs to help your organization familiarize itself with application hardening techniques and the security vulnerabilities that each technique thwarts. These four labs include:

•    Code Checksumming
•    Control Flow (non-) Integrity in Android Applications
•    Native Library Encryption
•    Encrypting Objective-C Selectors

Developers will walk away from these labs with a greater understanding of the theory behind each technique, as well illustrations and guided examples to help them implement them in their own application security strategy.

Download the technical manual here and begin building a stronger security posture through application hardening.

Mobile app security shouldn’t be left until the end of the development process. It is possible to integrate security measure throughout the entirety of the development process — even if your team is using one of the agile development methods. If an organization pushes security later in the development process, or even waits until the development process is complete, they run the risk of major complications and the consequences from security incidents. These include:

• Financial loss
• Reputational damage
• Data loss (company or customer)
• IP theft
• And more
  

This whitepaper will show your organization how to seamlessly integrate security throughout your mobile app’s development lifecycle, without slowing your app development teams down. Guardsquare covers each step of the secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) and shows you how security tests can be built into each of the seven phases: inception, requirements analysis, architecture and design, development, testing, deployment, and steady state.

Ready to take your security strategy to the next level? Download the full report to get started!

• Help you lock down your data and reduce the risk of ransomware attacks freezing your business
• Teach you about critical IT tactics to consider as part of your backup and recovery strategy
• Get a conversation started in your organization about security and meeting key service level objectives  for the business

What Can IT Leaders Do to Counter Endpoint Cost Inflation?

"Inflation and supply chain challenges have resulted in device costs increasing up to 20% since the start of 2021, placing significant pressure on budgets for end-user computing. This research identifies three key actions IT leaders must take when faced with extreme budget pressures."

How can IT Leaders counter this endpoint inflation? Recommendations include producing a TCO report on endpoint devices and refreshing, not replacing old hardware.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification is an industry‑recognized professional certification that validates one’s knowledge in the design and deployment of distributed applications in AWS Cloud.

Having the certification can be a unique opportunity to grow your career, boost your resume, highlight in‑demand skills and generally become more competitive.

Get this prep guide for FREE and learn all you need to know to pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification exam:

• Deep dive into exam domains (including storage, networking, security and more!)
• Tips on how to prepare and understand theories
• Links to useful resources and sample exam questions

Delivering superior customer experiences on a global scale is all in a day’s work for SAP Cloud Commerce partner, Corevist. To keep on top of the evolving needs of their worldwide client base, they needed new capabilities to address latency, availability, and data correlation challenges.

Read how SolarWinds® Observability helps the Corevist team automate operations, gain deeper insights into component relationships, and reduce remediation time with single-pane-of-glass visibility.