The IT world is constantly evolving with new buzzwords and trends to consider emerging on a daily basis. This post aims to cover 5 topics I think you should be looking at, if you aren’t already in a modern IT landscape. Hopefully it spurs some thoughts for you and helps to drive modern change for your, or your customers environment.
The idea here is not to go into a huge amount of detail about each section, I may do that at a later date.
Cloud/Multi-Cloud
I’ll start with the obvious one. Most organisations now have some form of cloud based service, whether it’s a SaaS, PaaS or IaaS. It’s favoured in many organisations due to the scalability, built in resiliency and in some cases lower overall TCO.
If you’re not using any form of cloud service I’d recommend evaluating your options, working out how much it might cost you and the additional resiliency and scalability options you can gain from a migration. It may be for you or it may not.
That said, if your on-premises hardware still has a few years of support with the vendor left, you could put this off for a few years until you can weigh up a hardware replacement vs cloud migration.
Tools like the Azure TCO calculator are great to prompt some thoughts about where you could save with a move to the cloud: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator | Microsoft Azure
If you’re not ready to move your infrastructure to IaaS or PaaS services, you could look at moving services such as email and file storage to SaaS services like Exchange Online and SharePoint (or equivalent other cloud vendors).
There is never a one solution fits all for any environment but there are so many cloud offerings these days there are likely a number of benefits of deploying some portion of cloud services to replace physical hardware in your datacentre/server room.
In terms of multi-cloud, more and more organisations are now looking at, or in some cases encouraged to, ensure that they are not reliant on a single cloud vendor. This could be for regulatory or compliance reasons. An example of this is backing up Microsoft 365 data to AWS, which leads me on to the next section.
SaaS Backup
There are so many organisations that I see out there using the default retention and “Recycle Bin” options for recovering business data for OneDrive, Sharepoint, Exchange Online, Dropbox, etc etc, when they’ve moved to the cloud. The reality is, that isn’t a realistic backup method and probably won’t fit the bill for a number of recovery scenarios.
I see a lot of situations where a client has removed a license from a user, or for malicious/accidental data deletions whereby the 90 day retention has passed. In this case the data is unrecoverable. This can lead to financial or reputational loss.
There are several SaaS backup offerings out there, a number of them offering a per user per month charge for unlimited storage retention. This is ideal to replace the default 90 day recovery periods.
Referring back to the first section, another benefit from this approach is that you could backup data to another cloud vendor, for example, Microsoft Exchange Online to AWS. By doing so, you’re not relying on a sole cloud vendor and trusting them with all of your crucial business data.
Zero-Trust Network Access
Traditional VPN clients are a thing of the past.. well not quite but ZTNA is definitely something you ought to be looking at. ZTNA works around the zero trust principle, i.e. a device or user should only have access to services/servers that they absolutely need to access, not everything on an entire subnet as you’d often find with a VPN.
A ZTNA provider will typically provide a cloud service which acts as a front door to your network resources, applying filtering based on user group membership and filtering policies. Some ZTNA providers also add in additional functionality such as web filtering and browser isolation that provide a highly secure method of working for your remote users.
Security Posture Validation
It’s all good applying new security controls to improve your overall security posture, but how are you (or your customers) ensuring that the changes you are making are positively impacting that posture.
Security Posture Validation tools are becoming increasingly popular for companies to do exactly that, continually review their overall score and improve over time.
The product I’ve used, has a series of vectors that enable you to run assessments against:
- Endpoint Security
- Web Application Firewall
- Mail Gateway
- Web Gateway
- Attack Surface Management (checks your external attack surface for things like email addresses exposed on the web, old software in use on external sites. Basically what an attacker would look for if they were planning to attack your network in some way).
- Lateral Movement
- Phishing Awareness
- Data Exfiltration
- Immediate Threats Intelligence – assesses your environment against newly released threats
On top of this they provide additional tools for red/purple teams to carry out advanced kill-chain simulations.
I won’t go into each of the vectors in this post but its worth searching for looking up security posture validation tools and seeing what benefit they can add to your security teams.
Meeting Room Audio Visual (AV)
Many organisations have moved to a hybrid-work model. Keeping staff engaged while in meetings, wherever they are is really key to ensuring productive output. With modern meeting room audio-visual kit such as Teams rooms there are so many advanced features that help to keep everyone involved and remove the boundaries between remote and meeting room attendees.
Some nice features of Teams Rooms (or other AV equipment) that are typically of benefit are:
- Wireless content sharing from mobile devices/laptops to the Teams room screens
- Intelligent speaking to identify who is talking and transcript their words to meeting notes
- Whiteboard and other app collaboration
- Utilising 2 large displays, one for the shared content and one to see participant cameras.
- Centralised management of devices from the cloud.
There are always new features being released and Microsoft are not the only vendor in this space.
