Moving Target Defense Blog

Before COVID-19 started making headlines earlier this year, government departments might have been considered unlikely candidates for making large scale remote working a success. However, with service levels maintained across the public sector despite challenging circumstances, this assumption has been thoroughly disproven. 

For the first two decades of the internet age, from the early 1990s to the 2010s, high-quality antivirus software that blocked the most malware came at an appropriate premium. After all, the endpoint was—and still is—of the primary attack vectors for cyber threats, so it stands to reason that antivirus could charge a premium to secure your endpoint. 

Although far from new in technological terms, the ubiquity of public and hybrid cloud use is a relatively recent phenomenon. Driven in part by the current COVID-19 pandemic, it would be difficult to find an organization that isn't relying on a cloud-based service right now.

How do you steal something that doesn’t exist? That’s the thinking behind the widespread fallacy that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is more secure than physical desktops.

Available anytime and capable of being run from anywhere, cloud computing provides a perfect solution to operational challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. With public and hybrid cloud use rising across every sector, dramatically increased uptake of cloud technology quickly became one of the more benign changes brought about this year.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced companies to experiment with remote work in ways they never had before. For many, working from home was the only viable option for weeks or months due to mandatory shutdown orders and grave public health concerns. But that doesn’t explain why 74% of the CFOs recently surveyed by Gartner plan to make some positions permanently remote even after the pandemic ends.

The recent leap towards cloud computing has fast-forwarded digital transformation for countless organizations. What there hasn’t been, however, is a corresponding improvement in the ability of organizations to secure the cloud. In fact, as more companies rely on the cloud to maintain their operations, they also risk accruing a cybersecurity deficit. In a survey conducted in February, over 60 percent of cybersecurity professionals indicated that their cloud implementation was already beyond their abilities to reliable secure these environments.

Cloud migration continues at a brisk pace. As many as 94% of enterprises now use the cloud, and data suggests that by the end of 2020, only 27% of workloads will happen on-premises. For everything from data storage to critical applications, the cloud is the first and often the only option many companies consider.

The recent rise in remote working has up-ended the corporate IT landscape. In a matter of days, remote working went from a nice-to-have perk to necessity for millions of companies globally as countries continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. . To keep pace with changing business needs, organizations have embraced virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which can help keep distributed workforces safe, flexible, and connected.

The term “new normal” means different things to different people. For some, the term is synonymous with a return to the office (just with a few tweaks), while others think that co-located teams are gone for good. The reality is probably somewhere in between. Household names like Google and Facebook are planning for a future where most of their employees work remotely most of the time. And where big tech goes, other organizations tend to follow.