Archive for the ‘Security’ Category

Desktop Virtualization, VDI and Client-Hosted

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Another acronym – just what the IT world needs, but VDI is with us now. VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is one type of desktop virtualization. It refers to hosting client virtual machines on a central server and deploying that virtual machine to any appropriate device –a PC, a thin client, a netbook on the road, etc. The other category of desktop virtualization is client-hosted. That model involves having two or more separate environments –as separate virtual machines on one client machine.
VDI is the more generally applicable model for business computing needs. This approach offers at first blush a lot of advantages. Your friendly, all setup as you like it office computing environment can be accessible to you anywhere from a lot of different devices.
Setting up a new desktop would take potentially minutes. Management, maintenance, updating of all of a business’s “desktops” is done centrally and probably more quickly than for separate desktop machine. The whole concept of a desktop PC goes away to some degree.

Cost, time and security advantages make the technology certainly intriguing. One disadvantage is the effort to get setup –without ending up with double the hardware investment. That is you could end up with bigger, more powerful servers and more of them plus be using desktops. A from scratch implementation with thin clients in place of desktops would make more sense.
The big players seems to be VWware and Microsoft. We will be deploying a pilot environment here at EBS and I will report back on our experiences.

Posted in Desktop Issues, Desktop OS, Security, Virtual Servers -VMware | 4 Comments »

Social Networking and Security

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

A recent Houston Chronicle [7/29/08] article pointed out that social networks are increasingly popular with “geezers” like me -and that “60% of Americans 43 to 63 are hanging out on social networking Web sites”. Of course your younger workers are also big players in this area, but the “older” user statistic helps show how pervasive such use is. This has strong implications for marketing, brand awareness, product reputations and of interest here – network security.

One security risk is social networks being a platform for “the thoughtless disclosure of confidential business information” per the June, 2009 Insiders Guide to SMB ["Cybercrime Countermeasures, Rich Freeman]. Especially if your employees are using social media -Facebook, Twtter, etc. while at work it would seem they could easily blab on about matters they should not be publishing to the world. At the least, you should caution employees about the need for discretion and confidentiality especially when online.

With layoffs up, the possibility of client or prospect lists, proposals or other confidential data being stolen by laid off or threatened employees is higher as well. A termination policy that includes a checklist for locking down systems and locking out ex-employees is a key for data and systems security.

Posted in Security, Web and Browsers | 2 Comments »

Dated Browser Versions

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

An article in the Houston Chronicle (”Dig a hole and shovel IE6 into it”, Dwight Silverman 7/20/09) has highlighted the problem of using dated browsers. While IE6 is 8 years old it is still in wide use – despite the fact that newer, much more secure versions of Internet Explorer  have been released. Check your browser version and get updated or nudge your IT responsible person. For security,  ease of use and features it is time to make the switch.

You can download IE8 at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/resultsForCategory.aspx?displaylang=en&categoryid=6

IE8 is per Microsoft, “faster, more secure, more reliable” than older IE versions and has accelerator and web slice features -more to come on those. I have just upgraded to IE 8 myself and I am running it and Google Chrome and comparing. The download/upgrade process is very easy. Note that IE is, at least, a bigger target for malicious attacks – if not a softer target, as discussed earlier. Take the step of upgrading to the most recent version if you use IE.

Posted in Security, Web and Browsers | 1 Comment »