Managed Services And Video Surveillance News

By The Business Solutions Network

CompTIA Study Highlights IoT Opportunities

In a recently released report titled Internet of Things Trends and Opportunities, CompTIA shared data from two online surveys conducted in May and June 2016. A total of 350 IT channel professionals and 512 business and IT executives participated in the surveys.

CompTIA’s report finds that 23 percent of channel companies surveyed say they’ve already made money from IoT offerings, compared to just 8 percent in 2015. Looking forward, one-third of channel firms expect to make money from IoT in the next 12 months.

“The channel is making significant progress with monetizing the IoT opportunity and, unlike past years, view themselves as strong profitability candidates,” says Seth Robinson, senior director, technology analysis, CompTIA.

However, CompTIA says stumbling blocks to widespread IoT deployments remain in play and will likely be there for the foreseeable future. Concerns about costs and return on investment; technical hurdles; and liability, privacy, security, and other regulatory matters are some of the major inhibitors.

Robinson said there are good reasons for channel companies to look favorably on IoT. “First, the complexity of IoT projects is beyond what many companies can handle internally, especially on the SMB end of the spectrum,” he explained. “Second, many areas of IoT are essentially extensions of the skills and lines of business that solutions providers already have.”

ConnectWise To Provide Microsoft Azure Support

ConnectWise recently revealed its CloudConsole, a tool for the management, monitoring, and billing of cloud services, is expanding to provide full support for Microsoft Azure. “The enthusiasm of ConnectWise partners for adding cloud-based capabilities is evident by the more than 300 active partner companies we already have managing over 1 million seats of Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions through CloudConsole,” says Craig Fulton, GM, ConnectWise Business Suite. “The next logical step is to give them the capacity to also manage all their customers’ Microsoft Azure resources — including virtual machines, websites, SQL databases, and storage — directly from ConnectWise via a single pane of glass.”

Some of the new Azure support capabilities being added to CloudConsole include:

• Proactive Monitoring: With ongoing access to the status of their customers’ Azure services via a central console, ConnectWise partners will have the ability to resolve issues before they impact a customer.
• Improved Billing: CloudConsole transforms a tedious, time-consuming manual billing process to one that can be accurately accomplished via a single click. Additional billing improvements include built-in proration for service upgrades and automatic updates of billing details.
• Secure, Fast Support: Support requests can be addressed without the need for username and password details.

Sophos Introduces Cross-Platform Always-On File Encryption

Sophos recently announced Sophos SafeGuard Encryption 8, a new synchronized encryption solution that protects data against theft from malware, attackers, or accidental leaks. All organizations can now choose to adopt the best practice of “always-on” file-level encryption to protect data accessed from mobile devices, laptops, desktops, on-premises networks, and cloud-based file sharing applications — across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android platforms.

Until now, management and adoption of encryption have been viewed as too complex, resulting in sporadic adoption. According to a Sophos survey, The State of Encryption Today, only 29 percent of IT managers said they always encrypt smartphones and only 43 percent of Macs, leaving high levels of exposure across an organization.

As part of Sophos’ synchronized security strategy, Sophos SafeGuard Encryption can respond automatically to threat incidents from connected endpoint protection. During an active infection, Sophos SafeGuard Encryption can temporarily revoke encryption keys to protect data, and users can automatically get those keys back after the incident is resolved. Sophos SafeGuard Encryption also synchronizes keys with Sophos Mobile Control, which secures file access rights on smartphones and tablets. Even encrypted documents can be accessed securely within the application’s Secure Work Space feature.

Genetec Unveils New VMS Version

Genetec recently announced version 5.5 of Security Center, the company’s open architecture, unified IP security platform that combines access control, video surveillance, ALPR, and communications. Security Center 5.5 offers enhanced levels of authentication and encryption, augmented video archiving and export management capabilities, and new choices of supported access control hardware. With capabilities designed to help organizations better secure their sites, version 5.5 gives administrators greater control and protection of their security infrastructure.

Additionally, with a new disaster recovery mode that allows the configuration of multiple failover directory servers at remote sites, Security Center 5.5 allows customers to implement more elaborate disaster recovery plans for their security platform. In the event of a disaster, failover servers at geographically disparate locations can immediately take control and ensure organizations continue to have access to their security platform and protect their people and assets.

Also in this latest release, map-centric monitoring offers enhanced, fluid map scaling for zooming effortlessly in and out of maps — from floor plans to satellite imagery — along with the option to geo-reference dynamic objects on a map with actual geographic coordinates for greater awareness and adding new map layers. With map layering, operators can add or remove details from a map in real time to narrow or broaden visualization of a site. To further simplify alarm management, Security Center 5.5 features alarm grouping and filtering so that operators can group alarms visually by type, state, or priority, as well as handle entire collections of alarms, such as acknowledging or forwarding an entire group.

StorageCraft To Launch Cloud Data Protection Solution

As many business applications have shifted to the cloud, so, too, has the data being stored. While most cloud providers will promise very high levels of security and data retention, it simply makes good sense to back data up via alterative means, if possible. StorageCraft Technology Corp. recently announced that it will be launching a cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery platform to address this very need. The platform will be the newest addition to the StorageCraft Recovery Solution, which currently includes the StorageCraft ShadowProtect family of software and the purpose-built disaster recovery StorageCraft Cloud Services. The new solution will initially support backup and recovery protection of applications for Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and Box.