Viewfinity CEO, Leonid Shtilman explored, with Doug Barney of Virtualization Review, the process of transitioning to a cloud based service for its Privilege Management solution. Shtilman’s interview was the last in a series of conversations with companies transitioning their tools to the cloud.

Barney and Shtilman focused the conversation around the key factors surrounding cloud transitions, including what drove Viewfinity’s transition initially, the ease of integration for existing customers, interoperability and customer reactions to the switch.

During the interview Shtilman calls out the economic advantages that customers experience by the using the Viewfinity cloud-based application. He explains, “Customers no longer have to focus on the management, maintenance and operations of the solution platform”, adding both immediate and long-term value for the customers. The cloud solution scales with business size and also eliminats the equipment, training and substantially higher costs of on-premises implementations. Shtilman notes, “Simply stated, Viewfinity’s cloud-based solution allows the IT department to effectively secure its endpoints and lessen user productivity issues, and allows the business to thrive in an aggressively changing technological ecosystem”.

Viewfinity’s focus on the cloud has proven to be an enormous benefit to customers of all sizes. The greatest testament to which is the 95% renewal rate that Viewfinity experienced in 2011 and maintained in 2012.

Read the full article here.

In the face of an increasingly alarming rate of cyber-attacks many organizations are rethinking their normal methods of network protection. Chris Paoli and Jeffrey Schwartz of Redmond Magazine reached out to industry experts and analysis for input.

This past March the intelligence community even went so far as to declare that cyber-attacks are now the nation’s biggest security threat, above even terrorism. No matter who you talk to, the consensus is strong: firewalls and anti-malware just don’t cut it against the sophisticated attacks of today. Gartner Inc. analyst and Research Director, Lawrence Pingree warns, “The threats that exist today are getting through many of today’s existing security controls. Advanced threat protection appliances that leverage virtual execution engines as a petri dish for malware are most effective to deal with the latest threats. Also, organizations much continue to upgrade their endpoint protection suites. The antivirus they bought several years ago is not the same as it is today”.

Lack of planning is often seen as the largest issue when dealing with these large scale security breaches and having only one strategy for IT security isn’t enough. Paoli and Schwartz suggest a segmented approach to handle each type of attack differently. “The fundamental difference between hackers who are trying just to show their muscles as cyber thieves [by] trying to get a financial advantage and governmental-sponsored attacks is in scale of operation,” says Leonid Shtilman, CEO of Viewfinity Inc. “It’s hard to believe that a group of two=to-three thieves could have developed Stuxnet [the computer worm used to attack Iran’s nuclear operations]. IT organizations may be well armed to protect databases containing credit-card data, but at the same time will not be prepared for an attack on Group Policies, which will lead to damage to the global infrastructure.”

In order to tackle these problems Gartner’s Pingree stresses the importance of staying abreast of IT security innovations – including privilege management. “Application control technology can play a significant hand in prevention of the latest attacks”, Pingree explains, “defense in depth and detect in depth are concepts that all customers should explore.”

The importance of increased protection is hard to argue with though, with a 40% increase in the number of breaches disclosed over the past two years alone. Shtilman explains a potential reason for the increase, “As several of the technical components of information systems have gotten more secure, attackers have shifted their focus to targeting the human link in these systems. [They] are finding it easier to trick people into giving them access to their credentials and using those access networks then to find ways to sneak into those same networks without credentials,” something which privilege management and removal of administrator rights can help with.

Read the FULL ARTICLE to see Paoli and Schwartz’s suggestions on how to start addressing these issues moving forward.

This Wednesday - May 8^th, 2013 - Phil Stasko, Director of IT for Apex Companies will present a case study for removing administrator rights without impeding user productivity. Join us for this informative webinar. 

Faced with the challenge of maintaining endpoint security and application control with a limited IT team, Apex was driven to find a cost effective and premium solution for removing administrator rights.

Join in to hear Stasko outline how he sought an approach with Viewfinity Privilege Management that would reverse the previously ineffective and costly way to manage privileges on locked down endpoints, without having a negative impact on user productivity. This live session will also demonstrate how to whitelist and manage user privileges with the Viewfinity solution.

Join us for the webinar, Wednesday, May 8^th at 9:00am Pacific / 12:00pm Eastern Time. Click here to register for the event.

As thousands of attendees poured into Europe’s largest Information Security Event, Viewfinity drove hundreds of attendees to its booth and gave demonstration after demonstration to the steady flow of visitors. Everyone from CEOs and Engineers to Security Architects and Analysts stopped by to find out more about how Viewfinity Privilege Management could benefit their organizations. 

In addition to the demonstrations and information sessions that the Viewfinity team offered throughout the day, they also raffled off some great Samsung Tablets to booth visitors. Winners of the tablets were Ben H., Telefonic O2, Frank H., Unibridge and Jamie C., Exacta Technologies.

                   

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth during the show. Stay posted for information about our TechEd NA and Gartner Security and Risk Management shows coming up in June 2013.

Here’s a quick 2 minute flash overview of what Viewfinity does:

www.viewfinity.com/vfadmin/ContentRepository/downloads/introduction.wmv

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/viewfinity) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/viewfinity).

As Viewfinity’s product ease, innovation, and value continues to march on, it’s interesting (but not surprising) to start seeing Viewfinity expertise start showing up in job requests.

If you are a Viewfinity admin, or have experience with Viewfinity systems management, Work Bridge Associates has a job opening you might be interested in:

http://www.workbridgeassociates.com/JOB/145600/IT-Help-Desk-Network-Administration-Support-.aspx

Lee Pender spent his lunch hour with Viewfinity – and has some awesome things to say about us.

Read through Lee’s lunchtime report:

http://rcpmag.com/blogs/lee-pender/2010/06/viewfinity-updates-cloud-based-systems-management-package.aspx

Prestigious Award Recognizes Most Promising Private Technology Ventures

WALTHAM, MA, June 15, 2010 - Viewfinity (www.viewfinity.com), the innovator of privilege and systems management, announced today it has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring's North America 100 award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the world North American business region.

Finalists for the 2010 edition of the Red Herring 100 North America award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the telecommunications, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, biotech, and clean tech industries sent in their submissions to qualify for the award.

"This year was especially difficult," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "Despite the global economic situation, there were many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products that we had a difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. Viewfinity shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring North America award. We know that this year’s crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to go far."

“We are honored that our unique approach to privilege and systems management is being recognized by the Red Herring judges,” said Gil Rapaport, President of Viewfinity. “In these tough economic times, IT professionals need a way to better control desktop operating environments and to reduce resolution times without adding additional IT staff. Viewfinity does this for both stationary and mobile users through its true native remote privilege and systems management capabilities.”

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across North America. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an invaluable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

About Viewfinity

Viewfinity offers privilege and systems management solutions to manage, support and control desktops, laptops and Windows servers.  Viewfinity is a single platform to support on-network and mobile users that allows IT administrators to manage and control any computer over the WAN regardless of worker location. 

Viewfinity complements traditional systems management, such as SCCM and SMS, by offering new flexibility to manage administrator rights for locked down computers.  With its web-hosted model, Viewfinity solves IT’s greatest headache--management of mobile workers—by providing true native remote systems management capabilities and absolute network independence.  For more information, visit www.viewfinity.com.

-New OS Image Deployment, Patch Management, Privilege Management and Interactive Dashboard Features Continue Viewfinity’s Commitment to Customers-

Waltham, MA – June 14, 2010 – Viewfinity (www.viewfinity.com), the innovator of privilege and systems management, today released version 3.0 of its solution suite. Nearly 3 months after its debut launch into the market, Viewfinity continues to make good on its commitment to customer-led product development and to build products that are critically needed in the market.

See the new features and updates in a live webcast demonstration, June 16th at 11:45 am ET

Register here to attend: http://www.viewfinity.com/Resources/LiveDemo.aspx?reg=sm

Additional Viewfinity features / functionality include:

· Privilege Management: administrators can create policies that will execute scripts without needing to assign local administrator rights to the end user; identify applications that require administrator rights, and permit or block the use of child processes

· OS Deployment: creates an exact disk image of the laptop/desktop including the operating system, configuration files and all applications and deploys the image to multiple systems simultaneously, making it ideal for rapid bare-metal installations (OS deployment via Acronis Snap Deploy)

· Patch Management: fully manages the distribution of updates released through Microsoft Update to computers in your network as well as mobile computers not connected to the internal network

· Viewfinity Dashboard: provides a quick view into the operations and status of the company assets through live monitoring of select desktops and servers to identify problematic areas

· Windows 7 OS Deployment with Viewfinity User Migration: a valuable add-on to the Acronis image deployment software for domain based migration of user personal settings, application settings and user data files to prepare for and perform the migration from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7.

Viewfinity also complements traditional systems management, such as SCCM, by offering new flexibility to manage administrator rights for locked down computers.

Viewfinity Systems Management solution can be delivered from a web-hosted platform or installed on premises. All desktop management is done through a secure and encrypted HTTPS connection which provides the ideal method for managing PCs for remote and mobile workers. Its web-hosted platform is also ideal for proof-of-concept evaluations because it eliminates the need to build a complex server environment to evaluate or deploy the software.

Online registration is available for trial evaluations here: http://www.viewfinity.com/SaasStart.aspx

Tags: Viewfinity, Desktop Management, Systems Management, Patch Management, OS Deployment, Software Deployment, Privilege Management, SaaS, Windows 7 Migration

About Viewfinity

Viewfinity is the innovator of systems and privilege management via cloud-computing, allowing IT professionals to focus on managing systems and not the platform's infrastructure. With the cloud model, IT can be up and running quickly to provide management, support and control for desktops, servers and laptops. This makes it extremely cost effective and easy for IT to support local as well as mobile workers.

Viewfinity uses virtualization technology as the foundation to simplify and automate deployment and management of applications, licenses and assets. Viewfinity also complements traditional systems management by offering compliance adherence to flexibly manage privileges for locked down computers. Viewfinity's cloud approach delivers immediate and long-term value, scales with business need, and eliminates the equipment, training, and substantially higher costs of on-premise implementations. Based in Waltham, MA, information on Viewfinity systems management solutions can be found at www.viewfinity.com.

Over the weekend I had to test a couple of products so I can recommend a solution to a real problem for one of my clients. One of my clients that runs a chain of farm implement dealerships (the green kind.)

The major problem my client is having is that one of their programs requires local administrative privileges. I think probably because it does direct hardware calls. Some of the users have laptops they have to take out into the field to hook up to farm machinery to perform diagnostics. This has presented a problem.

Privilege Elevation Made Simple… | My Life as an IT Guy

If you’re looking for great content about Viewfinity solutions, we’ve gathered few select links for you to Viewfinity information captured around the Internet.

• Viewfinity Named As Finalist for MITX Cloud-Computing Award

• Viewfinity offers SMEs PC management – IT-Web

• Intune Shows Need for Cloud Solutions, Says Viewfinity VMBlog

Cloud-Computing Companies to Watch - Network World

• Privilege Elevation Made Simple – The IT Guy

• IT industry analyst firm focused on cloud computing and IT management, recaps Viewfinity – Neovise