Cloudification, or the process of moving applications and services from local machines to those accessed over the internet, has long been a top priority for many businesses. By migrating resources to the Cloud, they are made accessible from any location, which improves availability for employees. The Cloud also reduces costs for businesses, eliminating the expenditure that comes with running servers, maintaining hardware, and patching operating systems and software.
However, while the acceleration of cloudification has been underway for quite some time, the events of 2020 have acted as a major catalyst for cloud adoption, making it more important than ever. Over the past few months, much has changed, both in business and in the world at large. Many services and processes are now housed in the cloud, rather than physically present in the workplace. While this brings with it a whole host of benefits to organisations, it can also be difficult to manage an unwieldy number of different consoles, especially for security.
The threat landscape is constantly evolving – botnet disruptions, newly discovered advanced persistent threat groups, cybercriminal groups ganging up. Businesses working remotely are even more vulnerable to these shifts. This makes real-time visibility into the security of networks all the more crucial, to allow rapid response and mitigation against any detected threats.
It is against this backdrop that ESET is launching ESET PROTECT Cloud, to help businesses to deploy, configure and centrally manage security products quickly and easily from one place. ESET PROTECT Cloud is the successor to ESET Cloud Administrator, broadening the solution and helping ESET extend segment coverage with a flexible, scalable and customisable cloud service. Customers who currently use ESET Cloud Administrator will automatically be updated to ESET PROTECT Cloud at no additional cost, and as this new offering increases the upper limit of managed devices, they will benefit from an increased number of seats. The solution focusses on solving the challenges and real-life problems faced by businesses of all sizes, by addressing their endpoint security management needs.
ESET PROTECT Cloud provides visibility across your network, including both on-premises and off-premises devices. IT administrators are able to view and manage all detections reported by ESET security software deployed in the network, and can export these detections – along with other log data – to security information and event management (SIEM) tools. In addition, IT admins can also access device-level information for hardware and software inventory management, helping to ensure complete situation awareness.
The solution brings a host of exciting new features, including cloud mobile device management (MDM), a cloud service natively integrated into ESET PROTECT Cloud. ESET PROTECT Cloud MDM works in conjunction with ESET Endpoint Security for Android, allowing management of mobile devices and adding another layer of security. This protects Android device users from the most common threats native to the platform, while also preventing the spread of malware that can first gain a foothold in your network via these mobile devices.
ESET PROTECT Cloud also introduces automatic updates of the management agents deployed on endpoints – bringing improved stability, compatibility and performance. This allows administrators to avoid any unnecessary maintenance of basic infrastructure.
Meanwhile, ESET PROTECT Cloud extends the platform coverage of ESET Full Disk Encryption, allowing Mac users to manage FileVault native encryption. ESET Full Disk Encryption is an add-on feature that allows admins to deploy, activate and encrypt endpoints with one click, after which they can monitor and manage the encryption status of data stored on connected endpoints from a central console. This greatly increases an organisation’s data security and facilitates compliance with GDPR and other regulations.
Secure Browser, which is available in ESET Endpoint Antivirus and ESET Endpoint Security, will be manageable through ESET PROTECT Cloud. This will protect web browsers against other processes running on the computer, preventing the browser from being manipulated and eliminating any browser extensions that fraudulently interfere with users’ actions.
Lastly, businesses will now be given the option to add ESET Dynamic Threat Defense, which uses a machine learning engine running on high-performance computers in the Cloud to provide advanced detection and protection from never-before-seen threats. ESET PROTECT Cloud users can also submit files for malware analysis in the cloud environment, and receive a report about sample behaviour. From the report, the administrator can learn more about the file, view its behavioural analysis and create a detection exclusion, if appropriate.
For more on the new and upgraded features that ESET PROTECT Cloud brings, as well as information on other security offerings from ESET, visit our website here.