This spring, the Department of Defense announced their new cyber protection strategy, which ultimately aims to prevent cyberattacks by nation-states and hacker groups alike. The DoD emphasized the need to strengthen both its cyber defense and cyber deterrence posture in order to best protect against cyberattacks of potentially significant consequence.
Although nation-states, particularly China and Russia, are adept at exploiting holes in security, equally worrisome threats come from hacker organizations affiliated with terror groups or gangs who perpetrate criminal cyberattacks for profit. Hackers of all stripes never rest in seeking out security vulnerabilities, while IT departments remain on a continuous treadmill of cyber defense, updates and patches. IT managers realize their networks remain vulnerable at the weakest spot in the perimeter, often a desktop lagging behind on security updates, or an operating system breached because of an exposure to a zero-day vulnerability. This constant grind leaves cyber security forces overworked and exhausted.
Centralize & Consolidate Security Strategy
In response, the DoD has announced plans to centralize and consolidate all of its IT services throughout the Washington area in order to help limit potential areas of attack and thus improve cybersecurity. This includes future plans to consolidate information, including software and data, from individual computers onto the network.
This is good news to those interested in state-of-the-art virtual computing and cloud computing solutions. For many government departments and agencies, and in industry segments such as financial services and healthcare, a best practice in cybersecurity should mean that individual computers should have as little data on them as possible, and security updates are best administered in the data center.
As an example, with conventional desktop IT administration security patches have to be updated on each individual computer’s operating system, which is a time-consuming and painstaking process. However, with the zero client approach, a patch can be applied immediately at the data center server and reach all virtual computers in the network, thus minimizing both risk and improving manageability.
VDI Is the Answer
Today, many organizations are turning to zero client computing.
Key advantages include:
- Fully mobile and secure
- NSA Suite B security
- AES-256 encryption
- No hard drive
- No OS
- No local storage
- No persistent user data
- No antivirus needed
The biggest recent innovation in the zero client space is mobility. Until now, zero clients were restricted to desktop implementations. NCS is the only company that offers a true mobile zero client laptop, and it is available in North America, the EU and Australia/New Zealand.
So if you are in government, healthcare, financial services – or any organization that values security – zero client computing will dramatically simplify your IT administration and management while improving security. Learn more about mobile zero client computing today!
