You are here: Home / Archives for Stephen Perciballi

The Ultimate Security Guide: A Better Way To Manage The Ever-Changing Security Landscape

September 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Download the Ultimate Security Guide Now!

According to the US Cyber Security Task Force, from October 2011 to February 2012 there were over 50,000 attempted or successful computer network intrusions in the United States alone. This makes security the fastest evolving area of IT today. As virtualization, cloud and BYOD continue to grow, expect a new set of threats to emerge that require new technologies to address them. These new threats are best contained by a holistic approach to security, an approach marked by a lower total cost of ownership as well as vendor and solution consolidation. The alternate strategy of purchasing individual point products often results in management and protection gaps.

To help you build an impenetrable IT environment, the Softchoice team has assembled the Ultimate Security Guide. We’ve collaborated with our internal security experts and top security partners to bring  you the most comprehensive guide available. Our Ultimate Security Guide gives you: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Servers, Storage and Networking Tagged With: ,

Destroy Your Laptop Without Ramifications!

July 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This article originally appeared on Stephen’s personal blog. You can visit it here.

Don’t let the introduction scare you.This post is actually more appropriate for less technical readers who have had a computer failure and lost data.

While on a recent business trip, the hard drive light on my laptop remained solid at all times. As time went on, Windows slowed to a crawl and became unusable. I looked at the resource monitor to see what was causing the disk to spin so much, so that I could kill it, but there weren’t even any IO hits. When I rebooted the computer I got a message “Detection Error on HDD” and Windows wouldn’t start at all any more.

It was basically over. While we were able to mount it with Ubuntu and recover some of the data left there, I was very glad to have committed to synchronizing data consistently enough to not lose anything.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , , , ,

Securing Passwords in Business: What You Really Need To Know

June 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Another week, another breach! It seems like every week we’re hearing about another major website’s secure passwords being compromised. Personal information is either being leaked for malicious purposes, or hackers are showing off their prowess for accessing “secure” information.

Last week 3 major websites reported their customer passwords were compromised:

If you have an account on any of these sites, it is highly recommended that you change your password immediately. Also no funny business: make sure that you use a different password on each of them.

Imagine someone contacting your business relationships. Or using your identity to manipulate business relationships you have spent time building. Or just as bad, manipulating personal relationships you are developing. When you use the same password for most of your services (including work systems) you make it very easy for someone to get into many – or all – of them.

Here are my recommendations for password management best practices to reduce your risk of exposure.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

When Your Desktops Go Virtual, Don’t Forget About Security

May 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The right VDI security achieves the costs and efficiencies your enterprise is looking for.

As server virtualization continues to go mainstream, achieving significant savings by optimizing resource utilization, many organizations are taking the lessons learned and benefits achieved and setting their sights on an even bigger challenge and opportunity: the desktop.

Desktop virtualization – or VDI for short – combines the robust virtualization technology from server virtualization with advanced session management and innovative network protocols to provide a user experience very similar to working on a dedicated desktop PC. But, with server hardware shared by multiple desktops (all completely isolated from each other), overall resource utilization is much more efficient – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Choosing An MDM Solution

April 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This article originally appeared on Stephen’s personal blog. You can visit it here.

Right now there are several types of Mobile Device Management solutions.  They all have their place when you consider security and total cost of ownership.  Some of them are going to be much more secure giving more piece of mind.  Others are going to integrate into or leverage existing systems giving you piece of mind that you are not standing up an entirely new environment that also needs to be managed and secured.

We will be focused on MDM solutions that manage Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Mobile.  Blackberry is very well known for having one of the most secure solutions already.  Until a few years ago they were pretty much the only game in town when it came to phones carrying sensitive data so I’m sure they have been under heavy attack.  Very few issues have been published about the Blackberry solution and it’s not because it wasn’t a target.

Generally every solution out there is going to allow you to push email, calendar, contacts.  You will also be able to configure other features on the device such as wifi and VPN profiles.  From a security perspective you are able to force passwords on and enforce complexity.  Finally you can wipe out the work email, calendar, and contacts that you push along with any other settings like VPN and wifi.  Or you could decide to simply wipe the entire device.  These are the main benefits of having an MDM.  Without these abilities I.T. is going to be tasked with managing and supporting all of these devices which would be extremely time consuming.

 

Regardless of which solution you choose there is still some inherent risk today unless you use this solution in conjunction with something else.

1.   Containers
 
This is the first type of MDM solution that made it’s way into corporate environments.  In a container system an application typically found on either iTunes or Google Play is installed on the device by the user. When they sign into the app with their corporate email address and password the app finds the MDM server and synchronizes policies.  Once synchronized email, calendar, and contacts are synchronized to the device.  The stand out feature here is that these services are synchronized to the app that they downloaded.   [Read more...]
Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Revolution of Client Computing

April 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This article originally appeared on Stephen’s personal blog. You can visit it here.

The future of client computing has a very different look and feel.  There are a couple of driving forces and they are driving hard and fast.

Always on connectivity is actually finally pervading.  Smartphones with 8MB/s data connections have been here for approximately a year. Tablets with similar connectivity are here.  And now ultabook laptops will include this capability too.  We will have access to our data wherever and whenever we want.

The force behind this persistent connectivity is ubiquitous data. We want our information, the same information, on our phone, on our tablet, on our PC. There are many examples of this becoming common in life and work today.

I frequently write the bulk of a grocery list in Evernote on my PC.  Then get home to realize a few more things are missing, so open Evernote again on my tablet and update the list.  Finally when I get around to going to the grocery store I consume the information from my phone and get things done.  I do use Evernote for other things but this is definitely my favorite as benign as it may be. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Computing Tagged With: , , , ,