The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released version 1.1 of its popular Framework for
Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, more widely known as the Cybersecurity Framework. The framework consists of standards, guidelines, and best practices to manage cybersecurity-related risk. It was developed with a focus on industries vital to national and economic security, including energy, banking, communications, and the defense industrial base. It has since proven flexible enough to be adopted voluntarily by large and small companies and organizations across all industry sectors, as well as by federal, state, and local governments.compliance-reference-card-NIST

Industry leader in Endpoint Security with awards from: Gartner, Forrester, CRN, ESG and MRG Effitas.

To stop the widest range of threats, Sophos Intercept X employs a comprehensive defense-in-depth approach to endpoint protection rather than simply relying on one primary security technique. This is the “the power of the plus” – a combination of leading foundational (traditional) and modern (next-gen) techniques. Intercept X integrates the industry’s top-rated malware detection and exploit protection with built-in endpoint detection and response (EDR).

Drive threat prevention to unmatched levels. The artificial intelligence built into Intercept X is a deep learning neural network, an advanced form of machine learning that detects both known and unknown malware without relying on signatures.

Deep learning makes Intercept X smarter, more scalable, and higher-performing than endpoint security solutions that use traditional machine learning or signature-based detection alone.

CryptoGuard in Intercept X is the world’s best ransomware protection. It uses behavioral analysis to stop never-before-seen ransomware and boot-record attacks, making it the most advanced anti-ransomware technology available

Intercept X includes the industry’s most powerful malware cleaner. While most virus cleaners simply remove offending malware files, Sophos Clean provides forensic-level remediation by eradicating malicious code as well as eliminating nasty registry key changes created by malware as well.

Award winning firewall from Sophos; Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, NSS Recommended, SC Award winner.

Sophos XG Firewall is the only network security solution that is able to fully identify the source of an infection on your network and automatically limit access to other network resources in response. This is made possible with our unique Sophos Security Heartbeat™ that shares telemetry and health status between Sophos endpoints and your firewall.

Expose Hidden Risks
Superior visibility into risky activity, suspicious traffic, and advanced threats helps you regain control of your network.

Stop Unknown Threats
Powerful next-gen protection technologies like deep learning and intrusion prevention keep your organization secure.

Isolate Infected Systems
Automatic threat response instantly identifies and isolates compromised systems on your network and stops threats from spreading.

XG Firewall integrates Deep Learning technology into our Sophos Sandstorm sandboxing. XG Firewall integrates some of the best technology from our leading Intercept X next-gen endpoint protection like exploit prevention and CryptoGuard Protection to identify malware exploits and ransomware before it gets on your network.

Sophos Mobile is a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) and security solution that helps businesses spend less time and effort to manage and secure traditional and mobile endpoints. The only UEM solution that integrates natively with a leading next-gen endpoint security platform, Sophos Mobile supports management of Windows 10, macOS, iOS, and Android devices.

Devices

• iOS, Android, Windows 10, macOS
• Configuration and policies
• Inventory and asset management
• Detailed reporting

Apps

• Install, remove, and view apps
• Enterprise app store
• App control, whitelist/blacklist
• Manage and configure Office 365 apps

Content

• Email and document container
• Publish content
• Container-only Management
• Native OS containerization

Security

• Compliance rules and remediation
• Malware, ransomware, PUAs
• Anti-phishing
• Web protection, web filtering
• Secure device tie-in with DUO two-factor authentication

Synchronized Security – Sophos Wireless combines the power of the Sophos Central platform and our unique Security Heartbeat™ functionality, to monitor and act upon the health status of connected endpoint and mobile clients and so reduce the risk to your trusted Wi-Fi networks.

• Integrates with Sophos Endpoint and/or Sophos Mobile when managed in Sophos Central
• Provides superior visibility to discover threats at the earliest possible moment
• Prevents lateral movement by automatically restricting web access for unhealthy clients

Another award winner – SC Magazine and CRN named Best Email Security Solution and Product of the Year.

See the Future
The same technology as our award-winning Intercept X, the artificial intelligence built into Sophos Email sandboxing is a deep learning neural network, able to detect both known and unknown malware, as well as unwanted applications before they execute.

Detonating files in series of virtual machines, we simulate real end user environments where behavior can be monitored, delivering you safe attachments.

Block Stealth Attacks
Time-of-click URL protection checks the website reputation of email links before delivery and also when you click – blocking stealthy, delayed attacks.

Block phishing imposters and protect employees from attacks using fraudulent email addresses that impersonate trusted contacts. A combination of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication techniques and email header analysis allows you to identify and permit legitimate emails, while blocking imposters – so you can trust your inbox again.

Secure any email service where you control the domain and DNS records. Seamless integration with Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, on-premises Exchange 2003+, and many more email providers.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, PC PRO award winner – SC Magazine Best UTM Solution.

Sophos UTM drives threat prevention to unmatched levels. The artificial intelligence built into Sophos Sandstorm is a deep learning neural network, an advanced form of machine learning, that detects both known and unknown malware without relying on signatures.

Sophos UTM 9.4 is one of the first Sophos products to offer our advanced next-gen cloud sandboxing technology.

Sandstorm provides a whole new level of ransomware and targeted attack protection, visibility, and analysis. It can quickly and accurately identify evasive threats before they enter your network.

Yet another award winner: NSS Recommended.

SophosLabs Threat Intelligence
Great web malware protection starts with our world-class in-house threat researchers that are working around the clock with advanced automation to identify and stay ahead of the latest threats.

Advanced Web Malware Protection
Only Sophos uses advanced technology like real-time JavaScript emulation, behavioral analysis, context sensitive inspection, and dynamic URL analysis for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

Live Web Protection
SophosLabs provides continual intelligence updates on the latest malware hosting, phishing and distribution sites as well as anonymizing proxies and other risky sites and only Sophos provide updates in real-time via our Live Protection network.

Our Sophos Web Appliance works seamlessly with your Sophos Secured Windows Endpoints to provide complete web protection for offsite users. When they leave the local network, the Sophos Endpoint takes over, providing full enforcement and protection everywhere they go. Policy updates and browsing activity are automatically synchronized. It all just works better together

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) allows your users to work from anywhere, anytime, increasing productivity. But the problem with allowing personal devices in the workplace is the lack of visibility, control and security for users.

Encourage BYOD, but stay secure by differentiating between corporate and employee-owned devices that access your applications. The Unified Endpoint Visibility dashboard will show a breakdown of your trusted and untrusted endpoints (desktops, laptops, mobile devices) and allow you to enforce access control policies accordingly.

We make it easy to identify managed and unmanaged devices by integrating with your existing Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) tools. We couple this with marking the managed device with a Duo identifier in order to establish them as ‘trusted.’

Most organizations allow remote users access to their entire network after they log in remotely via a virtual private network (VPN). This puts your entire network at risk if criminals manage to steal VPN credentials.

Secure on-premises applications and give your users remote access to specific applications without exposing your entire network. Give them secure, easy access to both internal and cloud applications without requiring them to connect to a virtual private network (VPN).

Using Duo’s Unified Endpoint Visibility data on trusted and untrusted devices, you can protect access to your critical applications, such as Sharepoint and JIRA, by setting custom device access policies to block any untrusted endpoints.

Sophos UTM provides a powerful all-in-one solution for network, web, and email security. The Sophos UTM is integrated with Duo to provide strong user authentication before allowing VPN access. Now, you can easily deploy strong authentication for remote access across your network without needing to update your applications and services, reducing risk for data breaches and meeting compliance requirements.

Duo’s integration with Sophos Mobile provides customers the flexibility to set BYOD access policies based on device trust and the sensitivity of the application being accessed. For example, security administrators can enforce that only devices managed by Sophos Mobile can access applications that contain sensitive customer data, like Salesforce.com.

Employees are your best and last line of defense. They need to be trained and remain on thier toes with security top-of-mind throughout the year.

KnowBe4 is the world’s most popular integrated platform for awareness training combined with simulated phishing attacks.

Train your employees with the world’s largest library of security awareness training content. Automated training campaigns with scheduled reminder emails.

Phish your users with best-in-class, fully automated simulated phishing attacks.

Enterprise-strength reporting, showing stats and graphs for both training and phishing purposes. Discover where your weak links are and strengthen your team.

Free Weak Password Test

Mail Security Assessment

USB Security Test

SpyCloud combines human and Dark Web intelligence with search capabilities to identify, analyze and proactively monitor for your organization’s compromised or stolen employee and customer data. SpyCloud automatically blocks credentials that have been compromised and can integrate with Active Directory.

Knowing if and when employee or customer credentials have been compromised signiificantly helps in deterring a breach.

Strengthen your Fraud investigations with SpyClouds dataset multiple Maltego Transforms.

The financial services (FinServ) industry is under enormous pressure to provide more innovative solutions to increasingly digital consumers. Not only are customers conducting transactions online and through mobile devices, but they also have a ton of services like Square or PayPal to choose from. In short, financial services organizations need to be agile and flexible enough to meet the demands of more technical and impatient customers. That means that they can’t be wasting valuable time and resources running traditional and clunky IT on the backend. A great place to start on this journey is by deploying cloud desktops.

How FinServ companies benefit from cloud desktops

Folks who have already worked with traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can tell you from experience that deploying VDI on-premises is extremely expensive and complex. It requires a massive upfront investment and an army of certified engineers to deploy and manage. That’s why more and more companies are moving to the cloud. The numbers are quite clear on this too. According to a report by Allied Market Research, the cloud-based VDI market is expected to reach $10.15 billion by 2023, growing annually at a CAGR of 16.5%. Let’s dig into some of the other reasons why FinServ companies in particular need to make the switch to the cloud.

Security – FinServ companies constantly deal with highly sensitive customer information. Because of this, the industry is also the most targeted by cyber criminals. According to Accenture, the number of security breaches in FinServ averages 125, costing the industry $18.28 million per year. With cloud VDI, sensitive data is stored centrally in highly secured and redundant cloud data centers, not on vulnerable end points. Google Cloud, for example, provides top-of-the-line security at every point in the stack, data encryption and is run by over 750 security experts that can ensure better security than companies could ever do in-house. Multipath Data layers in managed endpoint security, security awareness training, mobile and email protection while offering firewall, UTM, two-factor authentication and secure wi-fi protection.

Compliance – Being one of the most highly regulated industries, FinServ companies are under a tremendous amount of pressure to ensure that compliance mandates are met. Further, rules and regulations vary from country to country making it even more difficult to comply when doing business globally. Google Cloud’s global network of data centers are highly compliant, relieving FinServ organizations from the very real and potentially devastating effects of failing to comply with increasingly complex regulatory requirements.

Mobility – It’s no secret that today’s workforce is becoming more mobile, and it’s no different in the FinServ industry. Employees have come to expect to be able to access data and applications from anywhere, at any time and from whatever device they choose. And, happy employees are more productive in the long run. Cloud-based virtual desktops, powered by an automation and orchestration solution like the one Multipath Data deploys, enables organizations to provide the mobile or remote experience users expect, while ensuring that data remains secure and compliant in Google Cloud.

Legacy applications – While new cloud and mobile apps are being used in virtually every industry today, the fact is that most FinServ companies still rely on tried and true legacy apps. Many of these are Windows-based. Multipath Data enables organizations to deploy and legacy Windows-based apps in Google Cloud and in hybrid on-premises/cloud environments. CAS’ API integration with Google Cloud Compute Engine, Deployment Manager and Cloud Billing also enables organizations to have full control over their deployment – legacy apps and all – through a single, easy to use interface.

Long story short, cloud desktops are an excellent fit for the FinServ industry. Purpose-built for Google Cloud, the Multipath Data platform enables organizations to easily leverage the economies of scale the cloud offers for the lowest cost possible.

While it’s hard to quantify exactly how many lawsuits are filed each year, the demand for legal services could be a good indication as to how massive the market is. According to a report from The report from The Business Research Company, the global legal service market is on track to grow from $849 billion in 2017 to over $1 trillion by 2021. That’s a staggering figure. While there are many factors fueling this growth, developments in legal technology that enable law firms to be more productive, offer more innovative services and improve the quality of those services is a key driver. However, delivering legal technology to professionals in an efficient and secure way has been a challenge, particularly because many firms don’t have the IT expertise or budgets to do so. Enter cloud desktops, or cloud-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as it is commonly referred to.

Why Law and CPA firms need cloud desktops

The legal and accounting industries face many unique challenges, from information security and compliance to an increasingly mobile workforce – and a bunch in between. Deploying technology through cloud desktops enables organizations to meet these challenges head on in several ways.

• Security and compliance – Just about every piece of information legal and CPA professionals deal with is highly confidential. That makes firms a prime target for hackers. In fact, according to a recent report, 40% of law firms have been hacked without their knowledge. This not only costs a ton of money to recover from, but damages the firm’s reputation. By deploying technology through cloud desktops, all data is centrally stored in a cloud data center, not on vulnerable devices. Google Cloud Platform provides security at every level of the stack and is highly compliant, and Multipath Data layers in managed endpoint security, security awareness training, mobile and email protection while offering firewall, UTM, two-factor authentication and secure wi-fi protection.
• Remote/contract workers – Legal and CPA professionals are constantly on-the-go between multiple offices, the courthouse, clients office and home. Simply put, they need on-demand access to critical information from the multiple devices they use. Not only that, firms frequently hire contract or seasonal workers to assist when caseloads fluctuate. With an end-to-end IT infrastructure management solution like the Multipath Data Desktop solution, firms can provide technology to all workers by easily spinning up new virtual desktops and turning off ones that are no longer needed from Google Cloud. In addition, growing your storage pool to take on new clients when an opportunity arises is just a couple key strokes away.
• Costs – As with any industry, firms are under pressure to reduce IT costs. With cloud desktops, firms can eliminate capital expenditure on hardware required to run virtual desktops. Security is included with this solution which eliminates the added expense in hiring a cyber expert. Features in the Multipath Data Desktop solution like ServerUptime  scheduling and Autoscaling enable firms to reduce infrastructure costs significantly. Google Cloud’s per-second pricing and Custom Machine Types, which enable us to attach only the RAM and CPU resources your firm needs, enabling you to cut costs even further.
• Performance – Legal and CPA professionals can deal with extremely large files daily and can’t afford to wait for those to download due to limited bandwidth on a private network. By leveraging Google Cloud’s state of the art global network, those documents can be transferred and downloaded—especially for remote workers—quickly, saving precious time and money. In addition, Multipath Data enables you to create a VPN from your on-premises environment to Google Cloud, and also extend your existing Active Directory domain to multiple Google Cloud datacenters for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Legacy, on-prem VDI solutions are expensive and extremely complex to deploy and manage, and most firms simply don’t have the IT staff to implement and manage these environments. Besides, on-prem VDI requires a serious upfront investment on hardware infrastructure, and traditional VDI platforms constantly need to be updated to newer versions. By deploying technology through cloud desktops—managed by Multipath Data — firms can get all the benefits of VDI at a significantly lower cost and with better security and performance. Perhaps more importantly, legal and CPA professionals can focus on their core business rather than managing IT.

Over the last couple of decades, the business process outsourcing (BPO) market has exploded, largely because of the ubiquity of the Internet. According to Market Research Future, the market is set to reach $52 billion by the end of 2023.  It’s a super competitive industry, and companies constantly need to find new ways to innovate and lower cost overhead to stay in the game. After all, businesses have many choices, and if they aren’t getting the ROI they expect, it’s pretty easy to dump a BPO and find another within a few clicks. One way to do these things is with cloud-based virtual desktops.

BPO’s can benefit from cloud-hosted virtual desktops

Before we dig in, let’s clarify what we mean by BPOs. The market prediction above is actually pretty conservative since the companies covered in the report are large IT outsourcing and strategic consultancies like Accenture, Wipro and Tata Consultancy. We’re taking a broader view and including call centers as a subset of the wider BPO market. For more perspective on the opportunity, Statista reports that the worldwide call center industry alone reached over $200 billion in 2017. In our view, cloud-based virtual desktops are beneficial to both. Here are four reasons how all of these companies can benefit:

• Security — With VDI, critical data is stored and managed in a secure cloud data center, not on end user devices. If a device is lost or stolen, data remains secure. Administrators can also restrict access to data and applications for certain users based on role or responsibility within the organization, or location on the network. For instance, some users can be restricted from downloading data to a USB drive, copying and pasting sensitive information outside of the virtual environment, and so on. Further, hyperscale cloud providers like Google Cloud have strict security levels in place – at all levels of the stack. Multipath Data layers in managed endpoint security, security awareness training, mobile and email protection while offering firewall, UTM, two-factor authentication and secure wi-fi protection.
• Compliance — BPOs deal with highly sensitive customer, patient and personally identifiable information on a daily basis. Depending on the geographic location and what industry they are in, regulatory mandates vary for the companies BPOs serve. That’s a huge headache for these companies who more often than not operate globally. By migrating virtual desktops to a highly compliant cloud like Google Cloud, services organizations can be assured that compliance controls are in place. Companies can also decide where data is stored across GCP’s global footprint, and where users can authenticate from with Multipath Data’s hybrid and cloud-based Active Directory extension capability on GCP.
• Scalability — Companies often leverage BPOs for services when demand spikes seasonally. Think: retail during the holiday season or accounting during tax season. Not only do these organizations scale infrastructure resources in these times, but they also need to hire temporary call center employees to meet the increased demands. The very nature of hyperscale cloud enables companies to scale up or down at the lowest cost possible through consumption-based pricing. Going further, secure cloud-based virtual desktops are quick and simple to deploy for seasonal and temporary workers with an automation and orchestration solution that Multipath Data delivers.
• Productivity & talent — It’s now the norm for call centers to be on 24×7. It’s next to impossible to provide that service from a fixed location, not to mention find the different sets of talent required for every possible scenario that needs to be processed. By deploying cloud-based virtual desktops, companies can mitigate this by enabling a secure BYOD and remote working environment for agents. By now, it’s well known that a flexible working environment not only makes workers more productive, but that younger generations have come to expect the choice of where they work, and what device they work from. In addition, companies that enable BYOD and remote working save costs on facilities and devices. It’s a win-win all around.

We’re only scratching the surface on how cloud-based virtual desktops benefit the BPO and call center industry. Of course, the elephant in the room is the capital and operational expenditure costs companies can eliminate by leveraging fully automated cloud-based virtual desktops in the cloud. In short, Multipath Data’s end-to-end virtual desktop automation and orchestration on Google Cloud Platform can enable BPOs to achieve the ROI required to remain competitive in a cutthroat industry.

Analytics and Machine Learning

Both 2D and 3D graphics applications require a massive amount of infrastructure resources. In the past, media and entertainment companies have invested millions of dollars in on-premises rendering farms to enable the artists and engineers that work with these resource-hungry applications on a daily basis. These farms are incredibly expensive to procure and maintain, not to mention to power and cool. In the age of hyperscale clouds and VDI, however, visual effects and animation companies within the industry now have more cost-effective and flexible options. After all, they are in the business of content creation, not infrastructure procurement and management.

By leveraging the high-performance computing capabilities in the cloud and GPU-accelerated virtual graphics workstations, media and entertainment production companies can not only cut costs on expensive on-premises infrastructure, but scale environments up or down on-the-fly to enable a global workforce of artists, architects and engineers. The one thing that has been missing up until now, however, was a seamless way to centrally manage such complex and dispersed environments. Multipath Data has engaged a platform which was purpose-built for deploying and managing core IT infrastructure on Google Cloud.

Why M&E needs to deploy GPU-accelerated virtual workstations on the cloud

To address this market, we’ve added new capabilities to itopia to enable IT administrators to deploy and manage GPU-accelerated virtual graphics workstations on Google Cloud. By leveraging the comprehensive IT management capabilities of itopia CAS and NVIDIA P100 GPU accelerators on GCP, media and entertainment production companies can benefit in several ways.

• Lowering costs — By deploying virtual graphics workstations on Google Cloud, CapEx for an on-premises rendering farm is eliminated, not to mention OpEx on power, HVAC and maintenance costs.  Companies can also leverage Google’s per-second pricing and Custom Machine Types (easily configured through the CAS portal) to truly pay only for the resources they use or need. In addition, itopia’s Server Uptime Scheduling feature enables organizations to automatically spin servers up or down based on actual demand to further reduce GCP costs.
• Enabling a global/remote workforce — Because virtual graphics workstations can be securely accessed from anywhere and any device, media and entertainment companies can tap into artistic and engineering talent literally anywhere in the world. itopia enables organizations to deploy and manage the required IT resources to run virtual graphics workstations on Google Cloud’s global network of data centers from a single interface. Through itopia’s hybrid Active Directory extension capabilities, IT pros can easily deploy secure workstations to the GCP data center closest to the end user for the lowest latency and maximum performance. That means your creative and technical professionals can be more productive.
• Creating elasticity — On premises rendering farms have limited capacity. For instance, there are only so many CPUs that can be installed on physical workstations, and only so many workstations that can fit on the production floor. Add to that network, power, HVAC and file system performance limitations. By deploying Google Cloud-based virtual graphics workstations with itopia, media production companies can spin resources up or down on demand, and even create custom VMs to handle jobs of any size. Once the job is complete, companies can simply shut the VM down and get on to the next creative project with new VMs.
• Ensuring security & compliance — The security of intellectual property is a critical concern in the media and entertainment industry. The Multipath Data platform enables us to apply and manage security policies in hybrid environments and across Google Cloud’s global data centers. In addition, Google Cloud provides top-of-the-line security throughout the entire IT stack including: identity management, network security, and threat detection and response. Google Cloud also undergoes regular third-party audits, and is highly compliant with global regulatory standards, including specific requirements from the MPAA.
• Meeting consumer demand — Digital consumers expect a lot more from media and entertainment providers than ever before. Traditional M&E production models were linear in nature, meaning that consumers were content to wait for content to be released whenever companies decided to. In the age of streaming and “binge watching”, not so much. Deploying Google Cloud-based virtual graphics workstations with Multipath Data’s platform capabilities enables companies to produce the high-quality content consumers expect much faster and for less money. This is critical for companies that want to thrive in today’s hypercompetitive market.

While deploying GPU-accelerated virtual graphics workstations on a hyperscale cloud may seem like a no-brainer to tech-savvy media and entertainment companies, making the environments run smoothly can be a huge challenge. That’s why an IT infrastructure management solution is the best bet when it comes to managing such environments. The Multipath Data platform enables organizations to easily leverage the economies of scale the cloud offers for the lowest cost possible. In addition, the platform’s deep integration with Google Cloud gives administrators complete control over their GCP environment through a single interface. More importantly, perhaps, the platform + Google Cloud + NVIDIA enables media and entertainment companies to produce the high quality digital content consumers demand quickly and inexpensively.