Announced at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, Cisco announced Cisco Networking Cloud for simplified IT management, security service edge solution Cisco Secure Access, a new Secure Firewall 4200, Cisco Multicloud Defense, Cloud Native Application Security, Full-Stack Observability, a generative AI-powered security assistant and a new Webex device.

Cisco Networking Cloud

Cisco announced its vision for the Cisco Networking Cloud: to simplify network management via a single platform experience for seamlessly managing all networking domains.

New innovations include single sign-on, API key exchange/repository, sustainable data center networking solutions and expanded network assurance with Cisco Thousand Eyes.

Cisco says Networking Cloud will “dramatically simplify IT” with a more flexible Cisco Catalyst switch stack, improved visibility into data center power and energy consumption and new AI data center blueprints to improve performance and visibility for network operations.

Security enhancements

Cisco announced several new security tools and enhancements, including a new security service edge solution for hybrid work security, generative AI capabilities and innovations across firewall, multicloud and application security.

The company during its Cisco Live event announced its first generative AI capabilities in the Security Cloud, including an AI-powered Policy Assistant designed to help security and IT administrators describe granular security policies and evaluate how best to implement them across different aspects of their security infrastructure. It will be available later this year.

Cisco also announced a new SOC Assistant, available by the end of the year, to help support SOC analysts and detect and respond to threats faster by contextualizing events across email, web, endpoints and the network to tell the analyst what happened and the impact.

In addition, Cisco announced the Cisco Firewall 4200 Series, featuring AI and ML-based encrypted threat blocking without decryption, complete threat inspection and policy for each individual application and simplified branch routing. Cisco Secure Firewall 4200 Series appliance will be generally available in September 2023 supporting the 7.4 version of the operating system. The 7.4 OS will be generally available for the rest of the Secure Firewall appliance family in December 2023.

Cisco also announced new capabilities in Panoptica, the company’s cloud-native application security solution including Cloud Security Posture Management, a new attack path engine and an integration with Cisco’s Full Stack Observability portfolio.

Full-Stack Observability

The company also used its Cisco Live event to announce the general availability of its Full-Stack Observability (FSO) platform to give customers the ability to develop and grow an application ecosystem built on an open, extensible architecture, including new use cases in a single consumption model. Additionally, Cisco’s new bi-directional integration between AppDynamics and ThousandEyes drives powerful customer digital experience monitoring and closes observability gaps with rapid actionable recommendations and insights, the company says.

Room Bar Pro

Also at Cisco Live, Cisco announced the Room Bar Pro, a new easy-to-deploy video bar with “significant processing power, more connections, touch screen integration, and all of the advanced AI capabilities built into (Cisco’s) RoomOS platform.”

Cisco says the Room Bar Pro, based on the powerful NVIDIA processor, is optimized for medium workspaces (5-12 seats) of varying shapes. The device also features a dual camera system that reaches further, wider, and frames everyone in the room in ultra-high quality, even when participants are sitting at the ends of the table.

The post Cisco Live 2023: Simplified Management, Enhanced Security, AI appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The company calls the Logi Dock Flex a new fully-featured managed docking station built for shared desks in flexible work environments designed to help companies optimize their office space and provide insights on how work spaces are being used.

According to Scott Wharton, general manager of Logitech B2B, the Logi Dock Flex and new hotdesking service is designed to help companies encourage employees to come back to the office by helping them plan their in-office days.

“We took a multidimensional approach to building Logi Dock Flex that not only solves desk booking and management issues, but promotes social collaboration and gives IT and workplace managers data on how the tech and space are being used,” Wharton says in a statement.

Helping employees plan their office visits

With Logitech’s desk booking service–which can be used without the Logi Dock Flex and is free through the company’s Sync management portal–employees can plan days in the office with their teams, book a desk through Logi Tune and notify their teammates in-app. Once on-site, they plug into Logi Dock Flex with a single USB cable and get to work, the company says.

The Logi Dock Flex is an 8-inch display with six USB ports that supports dual display, network connection and up to 100 wats of power, allowing for secure standard-issue device connections and BYOD scenarios.

According to Logitech, the device allows employees to personalize their workstation with their own background photo and away message, and join meetings with one touch through calendar integrations with the Logi Tune app. For ad-hoc booking, the display signals whether the desk is available or not.

Helping IT manage hybrid work

For IT teams, the Logi Dock Flex allows them to install and deploy the device at scale with secure cable management, and the Logitech Sync management software allows IT to remotely monitor and manage the device, including adjusting booking settings, managing equipment and customizing according to the organization’s hybrid work policies.

In addition, the Logi Dock Flex’s multiservice capability allows IT to choose Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Logitech’s own desk booking service. Other services will be available at a later date.

However, the Logitech desk booking service is managed through Logitech Sync and can be deployed with either Logi Dock Flex or by using QR codes to work stand-alone, not requiring any purchase of Logitech hardware, the company says.

Logi Dock Flex also provides real-time insights and analytics on space usage to help organizations understand how flexible office and return-to-office policies are performing, the company says.

Availability

The device will be available in Fall 2023 with a suggested price of $699.

The desk booking service is available for free now. Premium features of the booking service like usage insights, alerts, and floor plan maps are free during the public beta through July 1, 2024.

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Like other tech giants, the company used its event to make important announcements in generative AI to help accelerate its enterprise adoption with Red Hat OpenShift AI, as well as several new capabilities in its automation platform Ansible.

The company is also focusing on simplifying management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and securing the software supply chain.

Let’s look at the more notable announcements from the Raleigh, North Carolina-based tech firm’s announcements at its Red Hat Summit event in Boston, Mass.:

Red Hat OpenShift AI and Generative AI

According to Red Hat, the company is building and expanding upon the capabilities of OpenShift and OpenShift Data Science with OpenShift AI to give IT operations leaders, data scientists and developers a unified solution to train, serve, monitor and manage the lifecycle of artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models and applications.

The company says Red Hat OpenShift AI underpins the generative AI services of IBM watsonx.ai, IBM’s new AI platform designed to scale intelligent applications and services across all aspects of the enterprise.

Red Hat says OpenShift AI solves a few key issues: the infrastructure-intensive training of AI models and requirement of specialized platforms and tools before serving, tuning and managing the model. OpenShift AI provides the infrastructure consistency across training, deployment and difference, the company says.

OpenShift AI provides a standardized foundation for creating production AI/ML models, as well as running the resulting applications, along with the ease-of-use and cloud-to-edge deployment options of OpenShift, the company says.

OpenShift AI provides several technology partner offerings, including Anaconda, IBM Watson Studio, Intel OpenVINO and AI Analytics Toolkit, NVIDIA AI Enterprise and Starburst, as well as 30 additional certified partners as part of the OpenShift ecosystem.

Customers with regulatory and compliance requirements, including air-gapped and disconnected environments can use OpenShift AI on -premises, while customers can also develop models in the public cloud and deploy them on-premises or at the edge, the company says. This provides a unique hybrid MLOps environment that enables collaboration between IT, data science and application developers, the company says.

According to Red Hat, new enhancements to OpenShift AI include deployment pipelines for AI/ML experiment tracking and automated ML workflows, model serving with GPU support for inference and custom model serving runtimes, and model monitoring to help organizations manage performance.

Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant

OpenShift AI, Red Hat says, is the base of IBM’s new AI enhancements including IBM Watson Code Assistant, to deliver domain-specific AI to IT organizations and developer teams.

This is done by bringing IBM Watson Code Assistant to Ansible, giving users the ability to write Ansible Playbooks with AI-generated recommendations. This new service is designed to help drive consistent and accurate automation adoption across an organization, the company says.

According to Red Hat, Ansible Lightspeed is the next phase of its Project Wisdom initiative, making it available to users, contributors, customers and Red Hat’s partner ecosystem. The service integrates with Watson Code Assistant, which will be available later this year. This allows access to IBM foundational models to quickly build automation code.

Event-Driven Ansible

Sticking with the IT automation theme, Red Hat also announced Event-Driven Ansible, a scalable solution designed to expand how organizations activate automation as a reliable strategy across the hybrid cloud.

The solution, slated for availability in June, is for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 customers; is designed to connect infrastructure and application observability tools with enterprise-grade Ansible automation, helping IT teams to pre-determine and define rules to initiate automated responses to situations like unresponsive system processes or unauthorized access requests.

When an event is trigged, the solution automatically executives the desired action via Ansible Playbooks or direct execution modules, with the ability to chain multiple events together into more complex automation actions, Red Hat says.

Event-Driven Ansible integrates with event sources form third-party monitoring, observability and IT tools, including Cisco ThousandEyes, CyberArk, Dynatrace, F5, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic, Palo Alto Networks, with additional partner integrations to follow.

Supplementary Red Hat-developed content is available for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Insights, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and ServiceNow, the company says.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux management

To help organizations better manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is launching new capabilities in Red Hat Insights to give IT teams more insight and management tools to find and resolve IT issues much faster across the hybrid cloud. The tools are available through any browser via console.redhat.com and are designed to unify the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments in a single user interface, the company says.

According to Red Hat, these expanded capabilities build on the information provided by existing Red Hat Insights’ predictive analytics, which can detect potential bugs, misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities using Red Hat’s expertise in running Linux platforms in critical production environments.

The enhancements allow IT administrators to fix bugs without needing Red Hat Satellite Server and act on server groups simultaneously using patch templates, as well as build standardized operating system images that comply with organization-specific requirements.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service

According to the company, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service is a new service that brings together Kubernetes-native security capabilities with a fully Red Hat-managed offering to help organizations take a security-forward approach to building, deploying and maintaining cloud-native applications regardless of the underlying Kubernetes platform.

The managed service supports both Red Hat OpenShift on private and public clouds and non-Red Hat Kubernetes services across major cloud providers, including Amazon EKS, Google GKE and Microsoft AKS, bringing security coverage to containerized applications regardless of where they are deployed.

Organizations can scale security capabilities across multiple clusters, whether on-prem or in the cloud while lowering operational costs by reducing the learning curve for implementing Kubernetes-native security without sacrificing necessary capabilities or enforcement, the company says.

Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain

Red Hat announced its Trusted Software Supply Chain Solution designed to protect against software supply chain vulnerabilities. The company says two new cloud services, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline and Red Hat Trusted Content, are joining in preview mode the existing Red Hat software and cloud services, including Quay and Advanced Cluster Security (ACS), to advance the successful adoption of DevSecOps practices, and embed security into the software development lifecycle.

Essentially, Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain allows customers to more efficiently code, build and monitor software using proven platforms, trusted content and real-time security scanning and remediation.

The solution allows customers to import git repositories and configure container-native continuous build, test, and deployment pipelines via a cloud service; inspect source code and transitive dependencies auto-generate Software Bills of Materials and verify and promote container images via a release criteria policy.

Visit the Red Hat Summit newsroom to learn more about these announcements and others.

The post Red Hat Summit 2023 Releases: AI, Automation, IT Management, Security appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The Windows announcements came during Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference, during which the Redmond, Wash. tech giant made several key AI announcements, including Windows 11 Copilot.

Windows 365 Boot

Among the Windows 11 IT and management announcements, the preview of Windows 365 Boot was perhaps the most notable, as it gives Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise users the ability to log directly into their Windows 365 Cloud PC as the primary Windows experience on their device. Windows 365 Boot will take users to their Windows 11 login experience, and they will then be directly connected to their Windows 365 Cloud PC with no additional steps.

Microsoft bills this as a tool for shared devices as logging in with a unique user identity can take a user to their own personal and secure Windows experience.

To deploy Windows 365 Boot to endpoints via Microsoft Intune, IT administrators will first need to ensure that they have Windows 11-based endpoints (Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise), enrollment in the Windows Insider Program (Dev Channel), Intune Administrator rights and Windows 365 Cloud PC licenses.

This Tech Community blog includes more information on how to deploy Windows 365 Boot.

Privacy and security

Microsoft is releasing several other new features designed to make Windows 11 more secure, including the public preview of ability to isolate Win32 applications for both consumer and commercial users.

According to Microsoft, this gives developers the ability to reduce the risk of security breaches by running Win32 apps in isolation to help prevent apps from having unexpected or unauthorized access to critical internal Windows subsystems, thereby minimizing the damage of an app is compromised.

Microsoft also rehashed its Sign-in Session Token Protection Policy, which it first announced at Microsoft Secure in March, which allows applications and services to cryptographically bind security tokens on the device to restrict attackers’ ability to impersonate users on a different device after stealing tokens.

In addition, Microsoft announced account badging, starting in June, which will send users an alert to their Start menu when their account needs attention.

Other security and privacy tools now available include new app privacy settings that give users the ability to allow or block access to presence sensor information and enable or disable presence sensing features, as well as a glanceable VPN on the taskbar to give users quick access to their VPN status.

IT management

For simplified IT management, Microsoft is adding new cloud-powered capabilities to Windows 11 Enterprise designed to lower the cost of managing and securing Windows devices.

This starts with Universal Print secure release with QR code for Android delivering step-by-step process authentication, including the ability to securely release a print job only to the employee for which it’s intended. This is designed to help prevent leaks of confidential information.

Microsoft is also making it easier for IT teams to connect to hybrid workers with organizational messages. The company says this allows IT in Windows 11 Enterprise organizations to send company-branded messages from Microsoft Intune to users on various Windows surfaces, including the notification panel, above the taskbar and the Get Started app.

Although it was announced last month, Microsoft also reiterated the preview release of the ability to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 Enterprise via Windows Autopatch.

Read Microsoft’s blog to learn more about these announcements.

The post Microsoft Releases Windows 365 Boot Preview, Windows 11 IT Management Features appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to the Austin, Texas-based provider of IT management tools, the new intelligent solutions and Service Desk AI virtual agent aims to help users solve IT issues on their own so IT professionals can focus on more complex issues.

Specifically, the Service Desk AI virtual agent can answer user questions and support troubleshooting, while continually learning based on interactions with users and adapting over time to provide helpful and relevant information. Meanwhile, guided incident response will help agents more effectively resolve complex issues.

Based on the company’s testing with customers, the new Service Desk AI features enabled IT teams to reduce ticket resolution time by 24% and save an average of 23 hours per week. Surveyed Service Desk customers reported a reduction in downtime of 21% on average and a 24% average increase in progress toward achieving service-level agreements, according to the company.

The new virtual agent adds to the company’s already easy-to-use Service Desk solution, which currently includes automated ticket-routing and AI-powered smart suggestions.

Bringing SolarWinds AI features to other departments

According to SolarWinds, organizations can customize SolarWinds Service Desk to provide efficient and intelligent ticket management systems and service request workflows for other business groups beyond the IT department, including human resources, legal, finance, sales marketing and others. Doing so can help those other departments deliver better service to colleagues.

SolarWinds later this year will launch a new enterprise service management solution designed to allow multiple departments within a single organization to have their own service portal, ticketing system and service catalog within one platform to allow for better cross-department workflows with keeping data segregated.

The new AI-powered ITSM upgrades come after SolarWinds released cloud-based and hybrid observability solutions and a new partner program in the past year. By investing in the AI-powered SolarWinds Platform, the company says it is blending observability and service management to consistently deliver simple and secure solutions for IT Ops, DevOps, SecOps, and CloudOps professionals.

The new virtual agent adds to the company’s already easy-to-use Service Desk solution, which currently includes automated ticket-routing and AI-powered smart suggestions.

In a statement, Cullen Childress, GVP of product management at SolarWinds, said IT management has become increasingly complex with the rapid pace of digital innovation and migration to the cloud in the last few years.

“Our ITSM solutions are a significant focus we’re investing in,” Childress said. “This includes Service Desk, which enables teams to focus more on important business priorities rather than mundane, time-consuming tasks. By leveraging advanced AI and powerful automation, SolarWinds makes users more productive, supports agents more efficiently, and helps ensure companies are more successful.”

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IT admins with a Windows or Microsoft 365 tenant, a subscription with access to Windows release health in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and an eligible admin role will be able to access the feature.

As some updates can cause more issues than they fix and break certain functions, this helps give IT admins advanced warning about those issues so they can make informed decisions about pushing updates out in their organization.

How the Windows email alert feature works

When admins sign up, they’ll receive emails about new issues for the Windows versions they support, as well as updates to other issues, including changes in issue status, workarounds and issue resolution.

IT admins first need to log in to the Microsoft 365 admin center and locate Windows release health. If they don’t see this option or don’t have access to the admin center, they need to contact the organization’s global admin and request access and an admin role in the tenant, Microsoft says.

Windows release health in the Microsoft 365 admin center is available to those with an admin role for an organization/tenant with an eligible Windows or Microsoft 365 for Business subscription, Microsoft says in a blog.

How to enroll

Specifically, admins’ organization will need to have one of these subscriptions: Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3/A3/F3, Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5/A5, Windows 10 Enterprise E3/A3, Windows 10 Enterprise E5/A5, Windows 11 Enterprise E3/A3, or Windows 11 Enterprise E5/A5.

By default, the person who purchased the organization’s Microsoft business subscription is the global admin.

To subscribe to Windows release health emails, visit the Windows release health in the Microsoft 365 admin center and navigate to Preferences > Email and select Send me email notifications about Windows release heath.

From there, admins can enter up to two email addresses per admin account to receive notifications. Addresses can also include distribution lists so IT can keep colleagues informed of issues even if they don’t have access to the admin center.

Admins can also select which versions of Windows thy want to be notified about. However, if one known issue affects multiple versions of Windows, admins will only see one email.

The notification body will include the full content published about the issue in the Windows release health section of the Microsoft 365 admin center. Admins will see the status, versions affected, and links to view the message in the admin center.

When available, the text will include links to resources with additional information, along with associated KB articles that can address or resolve an issue.

The post Microsoft to Send Admins Email Alerts on Windows Update Issues appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The analyst firm published a Q&A featuring Avivah Litan, a vice president analyst, who says a new class of AI trust, risk and security management tools (AI TRiSM) need to be developed to help organizations manage data and process flows between users and providers of those AI models.

However, there are currently no tools on the market that provide users with those privacy assurances or effective content filtering that help prevent errors, hallucinations, copyrighted materials or confidential information, Litan says.

Generative AI models–while potentially revolutionary–are far from perfect and are prone to mistakes, including factual errors and off-base responses. In addition, there is a growing trend of these generative AI tools being used for malicious purposes, including cyberattacks, deepfakes and more.

In a recent example, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a fashionable white puffer jacket went viral on social media,” Litan says in Gartner’s published article. “While this example was seemingly innocuous, it provided a glimpse into a future where deepfakes create significant reputational, counterfeit, fraud and political risks for individuals, organizations and governments.”

In addition to well-known data privacy and copyright issues associated with these AI models, Litan calls out more advanced cybersecurity concerns, saying providers of AI models don’t provide users with the tools they  need to audit all the security control sin place.

“The vendors also put a lot of emphasis on “red teaming” approaches,” Litan says. “These claims require that users put their full trust in the vendors’ abilities to execute on security objectives.”

Set policies, monitor, and potentially block ChatGPT

To deal with these risks, organizations should establish a governance and compliance framework for enterprise use of out-of-the-box solutions, and those policies should prohibit employees from asking questions that expose sensitive organizational or personal data, Litan says.

These policies could go as far as blocking unsanctioned use of ChatGPT and similar solutions and monitor event logs for violations. As of May 2023, several companies have begun blocking their users from using ChatGPT, including Apple, Amazon and Samsung.

Jason Wong, a distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner, previously told TechDecisions that organizations should establish a “center of excellence’” to bring together the activities using the technology to better understand the collective impact. While stopping short of calling for organizations to potentially block the use of ChatGPT and other AI models, Wong says IT leaders should actively monitor it usage and have an open dialogue with users rather than denying them the use of the technology outright.

However, Litan says a “prompt engineering approach” that uses tools to create, tune and evaluate prompt inputs and outputs requires additional steps to protect internal and other sensitive data used to engineer prompts on third-party infrastructure.

IT leaders should create and store engineered prompts as immutable assets which can represent vetted engineered prompts that can be safely used.

Update May 22, 2023: This article has been updated to include examples of companies blocking ChatGPT. 

The post Should IT Block the Use of ChatGPT, Generative AI Tools? appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The Redmond tech giant calls Windows 365 Frontline an easy and affordable way for organizations to expend the power and security of Cloud PCs to shift workers, giving users access to their personalized Windows apps, settings and data.

According to Microsoft, Windows 365 Frontline is designed to be accessible during a work shift, enabling users to work from anywhere on any device. For example, healthcare workers working in multiple hospitals can access their personalized Windows experience on any device.

In a blog, Microsoft gives several use cases, including healthcare workers visiting different hospitals, IT helpdesk workers, an insurance agent documenting on-site incidents, or customer support representatives.

Shift workers can share licenses instead of organizations paying for individual licenses that are only partially used. The offering can also be configured, deployed and managed with Microsoft Intune, helping IT teams save time and money.

According to Microsoft, each license enables three people to access a Cloud PC during their work hours, enabling organizations to only purchase enough licenses for the number of their active employees at any given time.

“For example, say you have 300 employees but only 100 of them work at the same time,” writes Wangui McKelvey, general manager of apps and endpoints at Microsoft, in an announcement blog. “You only need to purchase 100 licenses to give all 300 employees access to their personalized Windows experience during their shifts.”

Like other Cloud PCs, Windows 365 Frontline gives full access to a user’s personalized Windows experience, and it can be purchased, deployed and managed by Intune to help IT keep management of Cloud PCs and physical devices centralized.

When shift employees begin their shift, they can sign into Windows 365 from the web or Windows 365 app, and the personalized Cloud PC becomes available for the next employee when they sign out at the end of their shift.

The offering includes several security features while maintaining the seamless shift change experience, including an automatic lock screen that signs users out of their Cloud PCs after a specified time period and automatic sign-out if an employee forgets to sign out at the end of their shift. In addition, an auto reset function can restore the Cloud PC to its original state for each new session.

Microsoft says Windows 365 Frontline can also receive updates via Windows Update for Business, and admins can monitor usage patterns with Intune.

The company is also expanding Windows 365 to new endpoints, including LG’s new 2023 Smart TVs to create a workstation in a work-from-home scenario.

Microsoft is also working with Motorola to bring an enhanced Windows 365 experience to Android devices, including the Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola. This will allow people to use the ThinkPhone to plug-and-play Windows 365 connectivity that finds and automatically configures their Cloud PC for use on an external screen.

Microsoft also announced the new Windows 365 app generally available in the Microsoft Store, in addition to Windows 365 Boot and Windows 365 Switch to make it easier to log in to Cloud PCs and switch to the physical desktop.

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The partnership pairs ESET’s advanced security solutions with Atera’s cloud-based platform to help IT professionals automate and protect vital assets within the Atera platform. The integration results in an anti-malware and threat detection solution that provides real-time intelligence and threat monitoring to protect organizations of all verticals and sizes, the companies say.

According to a press release, the integration will include the option for users to activate, provision and deploy ESET’s products directly from Atera, providing additional ease of use within the platform. Customers will gain access to ESET’s dashboard, which includes license management, detailed reporting and customer site administration capabilities.

IT professionals using Atera have the option to choose from four popular solution tier packages: ESET PROTECT Entry, ESET PROTECT Advanced, ESET PROTECT Compete or ESET PROTECT Enterprise – advanced and customizable security solutions that include endpoint security, detection and response; file and mail server security; mobile security and more.

Atera recently announced a new integration with OpenAI, which is designed to help users automatically generate scripts to help execute processes that would otherwise weigh down already stretched-thin IT teams.

Atera CEO Gil Pekelman says in a statement that cyberattacks are increasing in sophistication and frequency, so the company wanted to partner with a cybersecurity leader like ESET to offer protection against malware and zero-day threats.

“ESET’s multi-layered approach to threat detection as well as response, including threat intelligence feeds, endpoint detection and response and advanced cloud sandboxing, helps our partners minimize their attack surface and address the growing threat landscape,” Pekelman says. “The resulting integrated offering represents a tremendous opportunity for Atera and its global customer base.”

Ryan Grant, vice president of sales for ESET North America, in a statement says the company has been impressed with Atera’s recent growth.

“Atera’s development team has worked tirelessly to ensure a best-in-class integration that enhances the customer experience for IT professionals by reducing complexity and providing proactive threat detection and response,” Grant says. “We are committed to growing together, serving our customers and expanding the integration over time.”

The post Atera, ESET Launch Anti-Malware, Threat Detection Integration appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to a Microsoft blog written by Michael Wallent, corporate vice president, of the company’s enterprise mobility management products, the new Intune Suite is deeply integrated with Microsoft Security and Microsoft 365 to give IT and security teams the data and AI tools they need to increase automation and help them shift from reactive to proactive in addressing endpoint management challenges.

The Intune Suite is made up of several different tools and capabilities designed for IT and security professionals, including Remote Help, Endpoint Privilege Management, advanced endpoint analytics, Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile App Management, management of specialty devices, advanced app management and cloud certificate management.

The launch of the Intune Suite comes after Microsoft first announced the plans at Microsoft Ignite 2022. The company then billed the bundled suite of advanced endpoint management solutions as a cost-effective plan that will help reduce total cost of ownership. The capabilities have been in development for a while, the company adds.

Remote Help, Wallent says, is a tool designed to help helpdesk professionals. It is already available for Windows users, but it is now coming to Android and Mac endpoints in future releases. IT helpdesk teams will be able to remotely troubleshoot a user’s desktop and mobile devices based on a user’s existing company identity. The coming Android support will help manage frontline workers’ devices.

In a separate Tech Community blog on Remote Help, Microsoft says it is adding new security controls and making it more efficient for users and IT.

Endpoint Privilege Management, which is in preview this month and generally available next month, is designed to enable the controlled elevation of Windows standard users so security controls don’t get in the way of productivity, Wallent writes.

The tool is designed to ensure that the right users have the right privileges at the right time to reduce the security risk of overprivileged users and reduce the burden on helpdesk professionals by allowing more self-service for basic scenarios, such as setting up a local printer.

The Intune Suite also offers advanced endpoint analytics to give IT administrators data-drive insights to help them understand, anticipate and improve the user experience or the organization, Wallent says. Advanced capabilities include anomaly detection, custom device scopes, and enhanced device timeline.

The Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile App Management, Wallent says, is a micro-VPN that connects corporate resources from personal iOS/iPadOS and Android devices to give employees access to company resources from personal mobile devices when needed.

This is designed to allow companies to embrace bring-your-own-device policies instead of purchasing corporate devices for every employee, the company says in a Tech Community blog.

For organizations with purpose-built devices, the Intune Suite includes specialty device management to give employees the flexibility to choose the device they need to do their job without introducing vulnerabilities. Microsoft is expanding the device types that Intune can manage, such as Teams Rooms, AR/VR devices, wearable headsets and other devices.

After the launch of the Intune Suite, Microsoft will be adding advanced app management, an enterprise catalog and control for app discovery, deployment and automatic updating. In addition, Microsoft will be launching a cloud certificate management solution to issue and manage VPN and Wi-Fi certificates from Intune to devices without on-premises infrastructure.

In addition to improving security and simplifying endpoint management, Microsoft says the bundled package in the Intune Suite is cheaper than the sum of all the individual capabilities of the Intune Suite.

The Intune Suite is available as an add-on to any plan that includes Intune, which is included in most Microsoft 365 subscriptions.  The individual solutions within the suite will also be available as standalone add-ons to Intune, so organizations can migrate to the Microsoft solution they prioritize based on their needs.

Microsoft is also introducing a new plan, Microsoft Intune Plan 2, that brings advanced features such as protecting and managing specialty devices for Tunnel for Mobile App Management for unenrolled devices.

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