Using Azure to Secure Employees at Home - This Quarters Theme at SoftwareMedia.com

At the beginning of Quarter 1 2020, I mentioned that this year was going to be an exciting one. I certainly never thought of the COVID – 19 pandemic, nor the series of earthquakes we had in Utah (largest ever recorded in Utah at 5.7). I was referring to the modern technologies that have begun to define how we can securely work from anywhere at anytime. But the timeliness of our topics hopefully has provided you some guidance, as we face a majority of the workforce working from home, while other businesses are shuddering their workforce due to an uncertain future market.  

Our original topic for this quarter was going to be azure specific. But given the state we are in, I thought we could expand the topic to Using Azure to Secure Employees at Home.  Every company is at a different stage of their journey to the cloud. Maybe identity and device management are your top priorities, or you are digging into long-term projects like multi-factor authentication (MFA) or desktop virtualization. Maybe you are working to empower access to resources via a browser. Every IT leader needs to define the priorities to enable productivity from anywhere across their organization’s workforce. We get that, and we want to help. 

Over the next few months, we will be touching on the following topics at various degrees of depth:  

User identity and access 
    • It all starts with managing identities 

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) 
    • Turning on MFA controls access to corporate resources 

Managing devices 
    • As you are making the transition to a cloud-based environment, managing the devices is as important as managing the data 

Productivity applications 
    • Microsoft 365 enables users to access resources and share files with Office apps across the web, mobile, and desktop, storing their content in the cloud by default. 

Access to line of business (LOB) applications 
    • Rolling out Windows virtual Desktop creates a secure container to work in, but even with most applications accessible in the cloud, some still require VPN.

Service monitoring 
    • With the increased load and usage from so many people working remotely, service monitoring has proven crucial to making sure everything is operating as it should. 

Culture and change management 
    • Remote work can create challenges to maintaining a healthy work culture and managing change. Modern social and engagement platforms can help make sure messages are heard, leadership is visible, and best practices are shared 

The following is a brief overview of the monthly themes and content we will share: 


April: Leveraging Windows Virtual Desktops to secure remote workers  

    • From an IT and operations perspective, virtual desktops are a highly beneficial tool. They reduce desktop management, infrastructure, and support costs. Upkeep and managing a PC accounts for 50-70% of the cost of owning a PC making virtual desktops a quick cost saving solution.  
    • We will show you the features, how to migrate windows Server remote apps to Azure, and how to deploy and scale in minutes  
    • A second webinar towards the end of the month will show the business use case through an interview with an organization that has gone through the transformation, their successes and challenges.  


May: Securing home offices using Azure VPNs 

    • Upwards of 50% of the American employee population is working from home right nowAzure VPN Gateway connects your on-premises networks to Azure through Site-to-Site VPNs in a similar way that you set up and connect to a remote branch office 
    • During this session we will share how to securely connect those employee home offices to your on-premises resources providing high availability and safe connections from anywhere. 


June: Business case study

    • Unfortunately, COVID 19 is not going anywhere soon, and the lasting impact and effects on business operations is hard to imagine. During June we will interview an organization that was impacted by this pandemic and was forced to move their employees remotely, securing their assets and the process they went through to minimize the disruption to business operations and processes. 
    
We hope you will find this very informative, opening new ways to look at the technologies you currently have and new ways to incorporate the solutions tighter into your business structure. As always, we are here to help you integrate these solutions into your operations as our team has done many times. There is no better partner than the one who has lived the adoption cycle 

Best, 

George Phipps
Vice President, Strategy

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