Do you have a solid ransomware recovery plan? I’m going to suggest that there may be a major gap in your plan. I can only imagine the sickening feeling of seeing the message “Your Files Are Encrypted” splashed across your screen. We’re all aware that the possibility of falling victim to a ransomware attack exists, but do you really know how prevalent these attacks have become? I was shocked by a recent statistic from Sophos’ report, “The State of Ransomware 2022,” that within the last year 66% of the organizations they surveyed had suffered a ransomware attack.

Everything about ransomware is going up; attack frequency, ransom demands, ransom amount paid, attack sophistication. It’s why most experts agree that it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when” you’ll be targeted.

Prevention Strategies are Not Enough

According to analyst Research and Markets, the global ransomware protection market is expected to reach $46.7 billion by 2028, rising at a market growth of 16.6% CAGR during the forecast period. And yet, with all the money spent on prevention, attacks and the financial losses that go along with them are rising. The data tells us that prevention is not enough. Organizations must have a solid and comprehensive ransomware recovery plan.

The Access Gap in Ransomware Recovery Strategies

According to customers we’ve spoken with who have been through an attack, the experience is immersive, overwhelming and exhausting. During this time, you’ll deal with insurance representatives, attorneys, ransomware specialists and the perpetrators to bring the attack to a conclusion.

Most companies prepare for a ransomware attack by focusing on applications and data. They may set up a cold site for applications. Often they also use multiple backup solutions from companies such as Netapp, Cohesity, Druva, Rubrik, and others to back up their files, data, and Active Directory. In addition, they may use cloud storage systems such as Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. that have built-in solutions for restoring corrupted files.

However they don’t have a good solution for access – and this is the gap in your plan. Since the PCs are infected – they can’t even be rebooted – users don’t have a mechanism to access the restored applications and data. Legacy VDI solutions may themselves be either unavailable during an attack, or may not be able to scale for the increased demand.

The High Cost of Loss of Access During an Attack

The Sophos report and many other sources cite 30 days as the average time it takes to remediate an attack. One month of lost productivity is a long time, and it’s going to be expensive in lost revenue and possibly even reputation damage. For an organization of 1,000 people, one month of downtime can easily cost upwards of $10m in lost productivity. And that doesn’t even factor in damage to your brand reputation.

Cloud PCs for Ransomware Recovery

What if, within an hour of detecting the attack, you could have all your employees back to work and avoid the financial impact of lost productivity?

Workspot Cloud PCs for Ransomware Recovery are imaged, kept up-to-date and are on standby in an isolated environment, serving as a modern “insurance plan” for immediate productivity recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. Within an hour of detecting the attack, employees can be back to being productive with their Cloud PCs, safely accessing the data and critical applications they need to keep the business running, continue to serve customers, and mitigate brand reputation damage. 

Here are the key characteristics of our solution: 

• Guaranteed capacity when you need it. We achieve this by enabling our customers to distribute Cloud PCs across multiple public clouds and multiple regions
  
• The Cloud PCs are accessible within an hour of an attack to reduce lost productivity and financial/reputation loss
• The Cloud PC must be simple for the end user. They should be able to access it with a single click – no training required. The Workspot platform determines the best available Cloud PC for them based on capacity availability and proximity.
• The Cloud PC platform must be simple to use so IT teams can activate the recovery Cloud PCs and then turn their attention back to malware remediation

You can access our Solution Brief here.

Compelling ROI for Cloud PCs for Ransomware Recovery

Cloud PCs are available for as little as $15 per user per month. Given the scope of the threat landscape today, the cost per user for implementing Cloud PCs for ransomware recovery pales in comparison to the financial risk of 30+ days of lost productivity.

Ransomware recovery is just one of many enterprise use cases we address with high-performance Cloud PCs and GPU cloud workstations. Bring us your toughest use case, and let’s talk! Schedule a demo here and we’ll show you how it works.

The post Ransomware Recovery: Can You Afford 30+ Days of Downtime from an Attack? appeared first on Workspot.

These challenges and more make a strong case for moving to SaaS cloud desktops, because our Enterprise Desktop Cloud platform shields your IT team from all that complexity, and the service takes care of upgrades, troubleshooting and management of your cloud desktops, offloading the management burden that can be so overwhelming. But what’s the best approach?

Cloud PCs, cloud VDI, cloud desktops? It’s getting crowded out there! That’s why it’s important to understand the fundamentals. The first consideration for a virtual desktop evaluation is the solution architecture, because the architecture dictates whether or not you can fulfill your end user computing requirements, including performance, scalability and security. From there, you probably want to know more about reliability.

In this blog, I want to introduce what sets the Workspot Enterprise Desktop Cloud platform apart from other virtual desktop solutions when it comes to virtual desktop availability. That difference is Workspot Watch.

What’s Your Virtual Desktop SLA?

Do you even know what desktop service level you’re delivering? If you’re running on-prem VDI, it’s a tough question. Many IT teams just don’t know. If you’re using a virtual desktop broker for cloud PCs from another vendor, there will be a service level agreement (SLA) for accessing their broker, but not for the uptime of your virtual desktop. That’s your problem, like it or not.

Workspot is different. Our enterprise-proven SaaS platform consistently achieves an SLA of 99.95% or greater – an industry leading uptime for your cloud desktops. There’s a whole bunch of innovation that enables us to deliver such robust reliability.

24×7 Cloud Desktop Monitoring with a Twist

What if you had a way to “watch” your cloud desktop implementation, even while you are peacefully sleeping without a cloud desktop care in the world? That’s the mission of Workspot Watch. Workspot Watch is a sophisticated, big data trending and correlation engine that drives the Network Operations Center where our support teams monitor, troubleshoot and analyze the health of Workspot cloud desktops globally. Think of our operations center as the “NASA Mission Control Center” of cloud desktops, operating continuously to anticipate, identify and help mitigate problems that may arise that could impact your cloud desktop operations. Workspot Watch collects millions of messages from endpoint devices, virtual machine agents, protocol gateways, enterprise connectors, and other Workspot control plane services.  The data is gathered from multiple clouds, spanning thousands of locations around the globe, and hundreds of networks in dozens of regional data centers. Workspot Watch is fully operational as part of your Workspot cloud desktop subscription, and our operations center staff  begins monitoring your implementation on day one.

Watch simplifies compliance, strengthens security

We made a critical architecture design decision to separate the control and data planes. This has significant implications for performance and scalability, but it also sets Workspot far apart from other virtual desktop solutions when it comes to security and compliance. Workspot was designed to enforce your Zero Trust Security policy, but we go way beyond just supporting zero trust endpoints.

Workspot Watch trending capabilities reveal activity patterns that can indicate a brewing security issue. As a result, Workspot support teams have been able to identify and quickly diagnose ransomware attacks, and then proactively alert the customer. Workspot makes the valuable cloud desktop health data that Watch generates available to individual customers too. Highly regulated organizations channel the data feed into their Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems to enable security alerts, monitoring and optimize day to day operations to ensure compliance with internal governance.

Although the Workspot Enterprise Desktop Cloud platform is instrumented throughout to feed activity data to the Workspot Watch big data engine, the fact that our cloud desktop control plane is completely separate from the customer’s data plane means that Workspot never sees, nor does it have access to customer data. This has important implications for meeting regulatory requirements, because unlike other virtual desktop solutions, this separation dramatically simplifies compliance audits because the Workspot platform is outside the scope of the audit.

How is Watch better than other vendors’ monitoring systems?

1) Workspot goes way beyond providing a monitoring tool and letting IT figure out what might be the issue – that’s what other vendors do. The Watch correlation engine feeds global cloud desktop activity data to the operations center to surface and alert on issues, trends and root causes. This unmatched data gathering and analysis is what enables our industry-leading cloud desktop SLA. Workspot Watch enables more predictive, proactive, and less reactive operations to ensure the highest possible availability so your users can always access their desktop.

2) Because we provide a global service, we can see system health both for your implementation and across customer implementations and clouds around the world. Our monitoring capabilities go beyond just the Workspot platform, often revealing patterns that could become a real issue for a single customer or for multiple customers. That comprehensive monitoring is how we were able to alert Microsoft about a problem that arose with a software update they implemented, because we witnessed it having a negative impact across our customer base. That saved Microsoft days of troubleshooting and ensured that our customers stayed up and running. No other virtual desktop solution can do that.

Workspot Watch enables Workspot to make a commitment to our enterprise IT customers for an industry leading SLA, so you can sleep well!

Why Not Just Build it Yourself?

Some organizations we’ve spoken with during their virtual desktop evaluation process believe they can build a monitoring engine that will provide what they need for a virtual desktop implementation. However, when they’ve taken a closer look, two obstacles emerge. First, they might be able to use a set of tools to achieve limited visibility to see what’s happening with an individual user, a desktop pool, or all of the pools in a single location. With a heavier investment, they might even be able to see what’s happening in their desktop pools in multiple locations. This definitely has some value. But at what cost? How long will it take to build this, and how many people will you need to hire to monitor the monitoring platform to make the data actionable? How much will that cost? How do you correlate signals from separate systems and time stamps to understand the trends and root causes?

Second, what you won’t be able to do with a DIY monitoring tool – at any cost – is benefit from visibility at massive scale into problems that may be arising across all implementations of that virtual desktop solution globally, or across all cloud regions around the world. That’s a huge blindspot.

Workspot Watch Has Your Cloud Desktops Covered

Large enterprises have complex environments, and staying on top of a global cloud desktop implementation requires a sophisticated big data engine that continuously gathers system health data globally, analyzes that data in real time to look for emerging patterns, and determines the “blast radius” of the problem so customers can be alerted to a potential issue. Workspot Watch, in conjunction with our Network Operations Center, is holding down the fort to protect your cloud desktops!

Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo so we can show you how it works.

The post Workspot Watch is Your Cloud Desktop Reliability Sentry appeared first on Workspot.

How Cloud Desktops Are Helping Right Now

Right now, the Workspot team is swamped taking care of our existing customers as they expand their cloud desktop implementations to support remote work. It’s incredibly gratifying that our cloud desktop platform is providing so much value; that our customers have so much confidence in our solutions that in a time of crisis they turn to us for help, and that we are a strategic part of these organizations’ business continuity plans. Not only have their cloud desktop implementations delivered the business benefits of greater productivity and agility, but they also were well-prepared to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak and keep their people safer and productive by seamlessly transitioning them to working at home. Some of our customers also chose to have pools of  “standby” cloud desktops which are always kept up to date, but they are not activated until the IT team declares that they need to be. During this current business disruption, the in-house IT teams are activating the DR cloud desktop pools – already pre-set with the corporate image and applications – with a single click. People can get back to work immediately from home, using their favorite device. Having centered their end-user computing strategies around Workspot, our customers can respond quickly to the current challenge, and rather than dealing with a temporary solution to get by for the next few weeks or months, they will be well-prepared for any future business disruptions as well.

At the same time, as you might imagine, we are receiving many more inquiries than usual and we are working hard to onboard new customers during this challenging time. What’s amazing is that we can deploy a brand new Windows 10 cloud desktop implementation faster than any other vendor. Once the initial implementation is live, customers can add new cloud desktops anywhere in the world – in minutes. This is another valuable lesson: Today it’s much easier for IT teams to be nimble and proactive and to react quickly to unforeseen business challenges.

Cloud Desktops Future-Proof Business Continuity

The best thing about the right cloud desktop solution is that adopting them now is not just a short term strategy to get you through the current situation. Some approaches to remote desktops are less reliable and the performance can be tricky for users. These are headaches you don’t need during a critical time. The most important thing for IT teams to learn as we navigate our way through this current crisis is that there are new and better ways to manage your “every day” desktops and workstations, and cloud desktops improve your overall business continuity and disaster recovery execution, today and for whatever the future brings us.

Today, you can set your expectations for end-user computing much higher. You should expect:

• A turnkey service; after all, don’t you have better things to do than worry about desktop SLAs?
• A solution that furthers your Zero Trust Security goals.
• Flat rate pricing that includes Azure costs.
• Initial deployment in days or weeks, not months and years.
• To be able to scale up the number of cloud desktops you need in minutes – globally.
• Happy, productive users who love the performance of their cloud desktops and GPU workstations.

When it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery, there are some really great capabilities to round out your readiness. This week Workspot announced new BC/DR capabilities, including an addition to our list of industry firsts. Today you can expect the following:

• An easy way to back up your cloud desktops to the cloud and quickly restore them when needed.
• *Industry first!* Cloud desktop replication in an alternate cloud region so you can quickly switch people over if your primary cloud region goes down for any reason.
• Have always-up-to-date cloud desktops for disaster recovery that don’t incur any Azure costs until you need to activate them during a business disruption.

In our blog next week, we’ll dive deeper into why these capabilities are so important. In the meantime, you can learn more here.

What are Customers Experiencing “In the Wild” Today?

Today we held a Town Hall Meeting with three CIOs who described how their organizations have been able to react to the COVID-19 crisis. You can watch this on-demand now; there is some great information and insights to share from these IT leaders.

Be distant and be safe!

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I don’t mean to be fatalistic, but it seems like we’ve had way more than our share of disasters lately, one right after another. 2017 has been a tough year for so many people and businesses – the terrible hurricanes, the fires in California, the earthquake in Mexico, monsoons and flooding and even a volcano eruption! And that’s just the damage that Mother Nature wrought. Humans cause business disruption as well, whether malicious or unintended. Unfortunately the next disaster, whether man- or nature-made, is around the corner, and we all need to prepare. But it doesn’t mean IT organizations have to live in fear.  Let’s see if we can help you sleep better at night with Cloud Desktops on Microsoft Azure.

Most organizations have a business continuity plan. It just may be incomplete, and with cloud computing becoming mainstream, it probably makes sense to take a closer look at how you’re executing IT disaster recovery (DR). Here’s some food for thought. There can be multiple elements to DR; everything from backups, to storage media on-site, to redundant systems in an offsite facility, or even a tractor trailer loaded full of physical PCs delivered where and when needed. These are the traditional ways that IT teams prepare to get their business up and running again as fast as possible after a business continuity event. The problem is that they’re expensive and complex, and they can take up to 72 hours for a working environment to be restored. It doesn’t sound that long, but 72 hours of lost productivity can have a profound affect on the business when project deadlines are missed. This kind of delay can definitely impact the bottom line, and it doesn’t have to happen.

Even if you can afford to build out a redundant site or reserve capacity on a standby tractor trailer, maintaining that infrastructure becomes a significant, ongoing operational expense. Each desktop will need to be regularly patched and updated as applications change to make sure that when the day comes that you need to implement your DR plan, everything is ready. Ensuring your DR desktops are kept in sync with your primary systems requires significant IT resources. Is any of this keeping you awake at night?

As we know, the stampede to cloud computing is undeniable. Organizations are reaping so many benefits by turning to virtual desktops and apps in their public-cloud-of-choice. We think Microsoft Azure is the way to go, and many major corporations and smaller companies think so too. Azure is the most enterprise-ready public cloud, and its phenomenal growth rate reflects the confidence so many businesses have placed in Microsoft. Organizations already virtualizing desktops and apps on Azure are most of the way to the finish line when it comes to modern DR preparedness. With virtual desktops, IT can centralize updates at the remote location and perform continuous data backup and synchronization, which means backup and restore is now a much easier task.

Moving desktops to the cloud means that your users can still access their applications and data even if they can’t make it into the primary office when disaster strikes. Armed with a personal laptop, or even an iPad and an internet connection, they can just start working.

What’s Best for Your Organization?

Here are three different DR scenarios:

Currently using physical desktops? Add Workspot Disaster Recovery Cloud 

After creating an account and defining templates for your corporate desktop image you will be prepared. If disaster strikes you will be able to activate your cloud PCs (right away – not in 72 hours!) and your users will be working again with minimal disruption. The service is priced on a pay-as-you-go model so you only pay for these “standby” cloud PCs when you need them.

Currently using VDI desktops in your datacenter? Add Workspot Disaster Recovery Cloud

VDI does remove the dependence on physical desktops, which certainly helps with DR, but in the event of a disaster, you can’t count on your data center infrastructure being available, so you still need a way to duplicate the VDI server infrastructure. A hybrid approach could make sense, although most CIOs today have a cloud-first startegy, and DR is yet another reason to go all cloud.  However, in this case, Workspot Desktop Cloud & Workspot App Cloud can run on-premises during normal business operations. Then if  your on-premises infrastructure is down, you just keep right on working using your cloud PCs in Azure. Workspot’s cloud-native control interface is uniquely suited to managing hybrid deployments because you can easily manage both on-prem virtual desktops and Azure cloud PCs from a single pane of glass.

Use Workspot Cloud PCs in Azure for everyday use – DR is built-in!

Because running your virtual apps and desktops in the cloud is inherently fault tolerant, using Workspot Desktop Cloud full time means that if disaster strikes, impacts are greatly mitigated. On the flip side, if you have already created a DR plan with cloud PCs as your “Plan B”, most of the heavy lifting has been done and switching over to our turnkey cloud PC service full time is a small step that brings with it many additional advantages.

Take the Next Step

Workspot Desktop Cloud enables IT to provision, deliver and manage virtual desktops and apps quickly and efficiently from Microsoft Azure with just a few clicks. Apps and data remain secure in a central location in Azure and thus backups are efficient and restore is quick. The service removes the need for IT professionals to physically perform the same tasks on multiple PCs, and upgrades to all cloud PCs are integrated and performed at the same time. Cloud PCs are just virtual machines in the cloud.

Benefits of cloud desktops, cloud apps, and cloud workstations:

• Dramatically reduces TCO (CapEx and OpEx)
• More robust security and better compliance
• Mobile users can work from anywhere on any device
• IT can provision virtual desktops and apps quickly for business agility
• Eliminates the need for deploying secondary offsite infrastructure for disaster recovery

For most companies, even a few hours of downtime can have a material impact on the bottom line. It is critical to ensure that workers can be productive even when disaster strikes. Contact us and let’s talk more about how Workspot Disaster Recovery Cloud can provide superior business continuity and keep the business up and running. Hmmm, do I hear snoring?  That’s the sound of Workspot customers sleeping well at night!

Watch our brief video to learn more about how to modernize your disaster recovery plan.

Jimmy Chang – Disaster Recovery Cloud from Workspot on Vimeo.

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