In Q1 2011, not surprisingly there was a lot of attention within the analyst community given to the topic of desktop lockdown and using privilege management and application control as a way to further protect distributed desktop environments. We have more information on these reports on our website, but here are just a few highlights noted in these reports that we felt are relevant:
“Removing administrator rights from end users is one of the single most-effective ways to improve overall security posture, but it must be well-planned to avoid common pitfalls and a failed project,” said Neil MacDonald and Michael A. Silver from Gartner Research. (Best Practices for Removing End-user Administrator Rights on Windows, March 14, 2011, Neil MacDonald | Michael A. Silver). Neil MacDonald further elaborates on this topic in his April 8, 2011, blog posting, Even With Windows 7, Privilege Management Tools May be Needed. In this posting he notes, "One of the top recommendations I made to increase your security “bang for the buck” in 2011 was to increase the percentage of users that run without administrative access." I recommend reading both the report and the blog article for an independent perspective on how to approach removing administrator rights.
“Viewfinity offers organizations the option of supporting privilege management even for off-the-network or non-domain users using a separate management server or software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructure.” Application Control and Whitelisting for Endpoints, March 10, 2011, Dan Blum, Gartner Research.
As noted above, our solution is specifically architected to easily support mobile and remote workforces. Viewfinity offers true native remote privilege management capabilities with absolute network independence; there is no reliance on corporate network connectivity or VPN. Our Privilege Management features are integrated with Active Directory however, Viewfinity does not require laptops or desktops to be part of the Active Directory domain or to be directly connected to the corporate network in order to activate policies that manage administrator privileges.
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