Viewfinity Privilege Management earned high marks in an independent product review by Wayne Rash, President and Analyst, of Wayne Rash & Associates. 

 “The single greatest security threat to most enterprises is the lack of control over administrative rights on client computers. By allowing employees administrative rights, you are opening the door to worms, Trojans and a host of other security problems. The security improvements in Windows 7 and third party privilege management solutions make the OS refresh the perfect time to remove rights. However, this issue is so critical that the removal of administrative privileges should be made as soon as possible,” says Wayne Rash, president and principal analyst of Wayne Rash & Associates.”

Here are some highlights of the Viewfinity review:

• “You can also use the Policy feature to block applications, so if a user has a peer to peer movie downloading package already installed, for example, you can prevent it from operating.

• “You can implement Viewfinity on any network using Windows machines, regardless of whether it Active Directory is in place."

• “With Windows 7, users are presented with a message from the User Account Control system when they attempt to invoke a function that requires administrative rights.” “Because Viewfinity is controlling the administrative rights, you can also control the UAC message.” 

 Click the picture to read the entire review:

“Cloud Computing Reality Check,” lands as number three in a recent round-up of the Top five themes from Gartner Security Summit 2011 by Eric Parizo, Senior Site Editor for SearchSecurity.com.

 Eric discusses the off the charts hype around cloud computing is now being replaced with confidence amongst information security pros.  Per Eric, the transition is a result of an understanding that the “vast majority of today’s enterprises cloud computing is SaaS (Software as a Service) and not the more complex platform or infrastructure variations that surrender a lot more control to third-party providers.” 

Viewfinity is pleased to report we are the only vendor who provides a privilege management solution via SaaS because our expert team of engineers fully grasp the technology behind it.  This year we’re seeing a trend in the market related to the adoption by enterprise-level organization of our SaaS-based product, with more than 50 percent opting to implement our SaaS version.  With IT security professionals being more confident with cloud computing, they are able to implement solutions faster allowing them to be more agile in their response for the ever-increasing need to add layers of security to their IT environments.   

Take a test drive of our award winning privilege management solution today. 

Lathrop & Gage LLP is a prestigious law firm with over 700 desktops and laptops running 400 plus applications.  As any IT team can imagine, this poses many challenges, especially related to its staff that works in various remote locations. So what steps did Lathrop take to secure its distributed computing environment?  

Lathrop made the decision to move to a least privileges PC environment.  With this decision, Lathrop decided that Viewfinity’s Privilege Management solution was the best solution for their needs because of its ability to manage and control mobile endpoints over a secure internet connection.  Among the challenges, IT needed a way to efficiently and immediately install custom applications needed by an attorney at a remote site.  The Lathrop IT team is able to push a policy that is immediately propagated on the endpoint (no logoff/logon cycle is needed), elevating privileges for the specific application requested by the attorney, allowing it to be installed and executed, without having to invoke a remote terminal session and use a RUNAS function. Thus the attorney’s focus is on the client’s requirements instead of having to take on the role of an IT support person. With Viewfinity, Lathrop has been able to manage user access privileges effectively and efficiently. 

Ben Weinberger, CIO, of Lathrop & Gage said, “With Viewfinity, we have a method for securing the endpoint client by elevating privileges on the application level, or for desktop functions, rather than providing blanket administrative permissions at the end user level. Being able to control lockdown policies and elevate privileges on the fly, regardless of the end user’s location, and do that cleanly, is very powerful. This has proactively alleviated many IT concerns.” 

Read the full Lathrop & Gage Case Study

Viewfinity offers 3 types of deployment methodologies: through our SaaS/Cloud platform or via your on-premise servers as a private cloud, or through GPO/Active Directory. The last one is implemented as an extension to Group Policy and managed through standard Group Policy Management tools offered by Microsoft.  Many organizations require more advanced Group Policy management features, for example, if you need to predict the impact of Group Policy changes in an offline environment, or  use advanced GPO planning,  controlling, troubleshooting or reporting on Group Policies. This can be accomplished using third party products such NetIQ Group Policy Administrator and Quest GPOAdmin, which provide the controls necessary to help identify and prevent unplanned, unmanaged, or malicious change—improving the security and overall availability of your IT environment. Organizations that have invested in third party Group Policy management and reporting products can manage Viewfinity policies using existing tools.  There is no need to change any existing business processes or use a separate management console for policy management.

Viewfinity GPO extension is managed using NetIQ Group Policy Administrator

Viewfinity Privilege Management Version 3.5, launched today, meets multiple business needs of a Least Privileges environment through a variety of “must have” capabilities including:

• Granular and flexible management of locked down environments
• Elevation of both time-based and permanent privileges for workstations and users

Viewfinity was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article this week.  Below is an excerpt with a link to the full article.

Though there’s nuances to each product, most of the small companies in this sector are either providing a subscription service with a lower price tag and ability to incorporate mobile workers in the platform, or selling virtual desktop technologies that enable customers to get a better handle on management by storing all their desktops inside the data center.

Here’s a sampling of start-ups and small companies trying to change this sector:

Viewfinity Inc. is selling a subscription service geared towards smaller companies that don’t have the means to buy and run a traditional PC management suite. Since the service runs over the Internet, it easily pulls mobile workers under its umbrella- something that’s difficult from the traditional on-premise vendors to accomplish. Investors include Giza Venture Capital, JK&B Capital and Longworth Venture Partners.

Read the full article: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/07/26/start-ups-look-to-disrupt-stodgy-pc-management-space/

As the feature sets of PC lifecycle management (PCLM) suites have increased, so has the complexity of their software. Organizations that don't allocate enough effort to properly manage the PCLM infrastructure are often unable to provide the desired level of service to their users.

For this and many other reasons, cloud-based solutions are emerging for a variety of systems management functions. Just as some companies are well-suited for cloud-based CRM, some companies are more well-suited than others for cloud-based PCLM. Is your company one of them? Dwain Kinghorn, Partner at SageCreek Partners and member of the Viewfinity Board, addresses this issue in greater detail on ebizQ: http://bit.ly/9acbxS.

You can download Dwain’s complete white paper from Viewfinity here: http://bit.ly/9HPNoh

If you’ve been following the news lately, you are already seeing us making some serious inroads into the industry for Cloud computer.  Today, NetworkWorld adds us to the top 15 companies to watch:

Read it here:

http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2010/ndc3/051010-ndc-cloud-companies.html?page=7