VDI infrastructure

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) adding security to your organization

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has many benefits (among them):

  • A scalable infrastructure: Virtual desktops have become more appealing due to the cloud. By using adaptable infrastructure to provide resources as needed, the consolidation of the full VDI desktop infrastructure onto a host server lowers overall costs because businesses don’t have to purchase or maintain the necessary hardware.
  • Management structure: The virtual desktop infrastructure allows administrators to patch, maintain, and modify all virtualized desktops simultaneously. As a result, there is no need to repair and maintain the entire network of desktop computers on an individual basis. Moreover, in the event of a major disruption, the data center has all information backed up and supported.
  • Enhanced Security: VDI desktop services allow organizations to preserve and protect their sensitive information because the data isn’t stored on the users’ individual devices but within the data center. If the employee’s laptop, desktop, or other device is compromised, the hacker cannot access the organization’s data. Of course, the effectiveness of the security will depend upon the IT team’s vigilance regarding system management, and the authentication process for the remote users has to be rigid and scrupulously maintained.
  • Improved user experience. Employees are allowed to use the device of their choice in the manner of their choice, making the remote working experience easier and more convenient.
  • Lower cost. The overheads for maintaining legacy hardware will be lowered considerably due to the reduced need to upgrade and maintain in-office hardware.

Our team, in conjunction with our skilled engineers at GCSIT, can help your organization plan, procure, implement and support your VDI solution.

Microsoft NCE (New Commerce Experience) and how it will impact your organization

Microsoft is releasing the details of the Microsoft NCE (New Commerce Experience) on January 10th, 2022.

This is a price increase for Microsoft 365 and a change in the commitment process.

– January 10, 2022: Microsoft will launch the general availability of NCE for Modern Work and Dynamics 365 for indirect partners to offer to CSP re-sellers. Microsoft will also offer two time-bound promotions to incentivize users via their reseller partners, to migrate to NCE.

These promos are:

 5% off annual subscriptions January through March 2022 

Monthly subscriptions will be available at annual pricing from January through June 2022.  

So, this would require you to sign up with your reseller and change from a month-to-month contract to an annual contract. There is an option to stay month-to-month, but there is a 20% premium fee!

– March 1, 2022: There will be a price increase for the following products: 

Enterprise 
Office 365 E1: $10 (from $8)

Office 365 E3: $23 (from $20) 

Office 365 E5: $38 (from $35) 

Microsoft 365 E3: $36 (from $32) 
 

SMB: 
Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $6 (from $5) 

Microsoft 365 Business Premium: $22 (from$20). 

Please note Microsoft is NOT changing pricing for Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft Business Standard, or the Frontline SKUs.

– March 10, 2022: All new subscriptions for Modern Work and Dynamics will be required to be procured through the NCE Platform.

  

– July 1, 2022:  All renewal subscriptions for Modern Work and Dynamics will be required to be procured through NCE Platform. Pax8 will no longer allow partners to renew customer subscriptions on CSP legacy. 

October 1, 2022: Incentives only available for NCE transactions (through MCI). 

  

– July 2023:  All non-migrated client subscriptions must be moved to the New Commerce Experience.  

  

What Does This Mean for You?

Moving to the New Commerce Experience will help you prepare for future growth thanks to improved revenue predictability, reduced licensing complexity, multiple term options, and features that enable new sales capabilities and operational efficiencies. You can expect: 

Term Options 

– Monthly term options at 20% premium – if you want to stay on month-to-month, there is a 20% premium in cost.

– Annual term options; upfront or monthly payments 

– Tri-annual term options; upfront, annual, or monthly payments  

Cancelation period is now 3 days, including day of purchase. There will be a full refund issued if canceled on day 1, and a pro-rated refund if cancelled on days 2 and 3. 

Windows 365: Windows 365 subscriptions will only be available via the monthly term offer on NCE. Windows 365 subscriptions will not be subject to the 20% premium for monthly terms at this time.  

Nonprofit and Education: Nonprofit and Education licenses will not be offered on NCE at this time. Non- Profit and Education products will not be affected by the price increases in March.  

VDI infrastructure

Covid has changed the way we use the Internet at home

A recent article in the NY Times, highlighted the fact that we have moved away from our phones as the primary mode of interacting with content on the internet, as we sheltered at home.  In addition, there has been a huge increase in the use of video chat, including Zoom, Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams, as we look at ways to perform the face to face interactions that we took for granted, in our day to day lives and work environments.

Working from home has changed many company’s employee interactions with high reliance on the tools that allow them to do their jobs, while still being home to take care of children who are also remotely learning.   As a Managed Service Provider, we have been hard pressed to assist our clients in expanding the availability of remote access to critical software tools, stuck at their corporate offices and co-location facilities.   Companies that readily integrated cloud services, such as Office 365, Google Suite and Egnyte have fared better and been more easily able to transition to this difficult, distributed work force.

If your company has not thought about how they are going to support their home-workers, it is a good time to evaluate the services of a good Managed Service Provider that can help you create a strategic plan to provide services, maintain and support your remote teams.   The home environment adds other security issues as well, with unknown firewalls, wifi and IOT devices with potential access to your company’s data.

If your company is in search of good advice, we’re here to help in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as the Anchorage Metro.

secure data center

Identity Management in the Cloud age

Your business, like many companies, have adopted several cloud services, where the price and convenience outweighed the higher cost of hosting the application on your own servers.  These services, be they email, documents, applications, databases or other collaboration tools, have broken the tightly guarded walled garden that your IT team has created behind your firewall and VPNs, allowing access to your company data via additional vectors with various security controls.

Most of these applications are only protected by one simple permission:  the password.

Data breaches are becoming more and more commonplace.  Lost and stolen data has exceeded six billion records in the past few year – an average of over 165,000 records compromised every hour!  The related damage is estimated to exceed $6 Trillion annually by 2021.  The recent Equifax breach, of a 143 million people (there are only 250 million or so adults in the US), highlights the vulnerability of weak passwords and open data portals.

In order to safeguard our important assets and reduce the risk of breaches, we need to rethink on how we approach organizational security

Access

New technologies, platforms and applications have accelerated the disintegration of the corporate security perimeter, creating a multitude of identities, user names and passwords.  This use of cloud computing has increased trends of enabling employees to access network servers and sensitive information from outside the enterprise.  Companies with static perimeter-based security methods (Firewalls, VPNS) will have a hard time managing both employee and partner access to critical data while maintaining any semblance of security.

Cyber criminals take aim at identities, from all types of users in your organization, from privileged users to vendors.  They focus on weak passwords and social engineering to achieve their aims.  Nearly two-thirds of all recently confirmed data breaches involved weak, default, or stolen passwords.   In the first quarter of 2016 alone, there were an estimated 6.3 million phishing emails and 93% of all phishing emails contained ransomware.

Consequenses

No one is safe.  In 2016, Yahoo revealed that the account information for over ONE BILLION consumers, including names, email addresses and encrypted passwords, were compromised by a data breach in 2013.

Dozens of companies experienced major outages when the DNS provider Dyn experienced a severe and extended Denial of Service attack (DDoS).  What was the cause?  Passwords.  Default passwords on millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that were hijacked and used together as the Mirai botnet.

Next Stop, Security

How do we protect against breaches in our organizations, with this porous, multi-vendor, cloud-based enterprise?  You must be able to adapt to new threats as they emerge.  You must be able to incorporate cloud, mobile, IoT and other technologies, into a seamless defense, following your users as they work across applications and tools – Wherever they are hosted.

Companies must adopt Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions and practices that significantly reduce the likelihood of a data breach, by enabling secure access to your data from any device, for users inside and outside your organization.

How do we do this?

  • Consolidate identify stores into a single directory
  • Implementing single sign-on
  • Governing access through time-bound and temporary privileged access
  • Automating mobile application provisioning and deprovisioning of applications
  • Automatically deprovision privileged user access as they terminate from your organization
  • Eliminating the use of shared administrative accounts and centrally controlling access to shared service accounts
  • Recording all privileged sessions or commands
  • Automating role-based provisioning of applications and infrastructure

Forte can help your company ensure that identities are protected through an integrated solution across applications, devices and infrastructure.

http://www.forte-systems.com/trends/identity-management

Microsoft will be ending support for Office 2013 at the end of February.

Microsoft has made an announcement, informing Office 365 users, that the 2013 version of Office will no longer be supported as of February 28th, 2017.

Users who are running the 2013 versions of Office 365 client applications after February 28, 2017 will have to upgrade to the latest version of Office 365 client applications to continue to receive support from Microsoft. The following is a list of products for which support will end:

  • Office 365 ProPlus (2013)
  • Office 365 Small Business Premium (2013)
  • Office 365 Business (2013)
  • Project Pro for Office 365 (2013)
  • Visio Pro for Office 365 (2013)

After February 28, 2017 the following apply:

  • All 2013 versions of Office 365 client applications (32 and 64-bit) and all language packs will no longer be available for installation from the Office 365 Admin Center.
  • An updated 2013 version of the Office Deployment Tool will be released that will no longer support the installation of Office 365 client applications.
  • Microsoft will not release any feature updates for these versions of the products.
  • Microsoft will no longer provide support for these versions of the products through Customer Service and Support (CSS) or Microsoft Premier Support.
  • Microsoft will continue to release critical and important security updates for these versions of the products until April 10, 2018. See the following Microsoft website: Security Bulletin Severity Rating System.
  • Microsoft will not provide notification before implementing potentially disruptive changes that may result in a service interruption for users of the 2013 versions of Office 365 client applications. See the following Microsoft website: Microsoft Online Services support lifecycle policy.

If your company needs support in updating your volume license for Microsoft Office, or migrating to Microsoft Office 365, please contact us, at sales@forte-systems.com .Cloud Computing Lab Top

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