Amazon Web Services (AWS) has won a contract to provide sports clothing brand Adidas with a cloud environment for hosting its SAP workloads.

German-based multinational Adidas AG also intends to develop a modern SAP S/4HANA platform using AWS, according to the deal.

By integrating SAP into its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Adidas aims to connect data across its global operations, while also tapping into AWS‘ SAP expertise to support advanced analytics, data science, and enterprise reporting, the company said in a release.

Utilizing AWS’ machine learning solutions, including Amazon SageMaker, Adidas’ data scientists can forecast seasonal demand for goods. This ensures the right product arrives at a warehouse or retail store at the right time, increasing customer satisfaction.

Through a cloud-based data lake on AWS, Adidas can also gain visibility into both internal and outbound operations, while AWS Sustainability programmes will also assist Adidas in reducing the environmental impact of its cloud operations.

Adidas said the deal will allow it to offer customers discounts and early access to new releases, priority services, and personalized offers.

“We want to drive innovation across our business, which includes everything from how we design our products to how we engage with the consumers who buy them. By committing to cloud infrastructure, we have the scalability and elasticity we need to handle the seasonality of our business during peak demand, and support the projected growth in our e-commerce business in the years to come,” explained Markus Rautert, senior vice president of technology enablement at Adidas AG.

“Deploying SAP environments on AWS isn’t just about transforming our technology—it’s about transforming business opportunities and using AWS’ wide range of cloud capabilities to create efficiencies and bring us closer to consumers,” he added.

Hosting company GoDaddy has said that around 1.2 million users have been affected by a data breach on its managed WordPress hosting service.

The hack is said to have exposed email addresses, customer numbers, administrative login credentials, and in some cases SSL private keys.

The hosting company discovered that an intruder had gained access to its managed WordPress hosting environment on Nov 17, it said in a filing with the SEC. The intruder used a stolen password to access the provisioning system for the service.

Up to 1.2 million active and former users of the company’s managed service had their email addresses and customer numbers exposed, the company said, raising the possibility of further phishing attacks to come. The original administrative passwords for the managed WordPress accounts were also available to the hacker, putting the accounts themselves at risk if the credentials were still in use.

Also exposed were sFTP and database usernames and passwords, and an undisclosed number of users also had their SSL private keys exposed.

GoDaddy discovered that the intruder had been inside the system since September 6, meaning that the hacker has had access to the data for over two months. It worked with a forensics company upon discovering the incident, and has taken steps to safeguard its systems, including changing original administrative passwords that were still in use, resetting sFTP and database passwords, and installing new digital certificates for affected customers.

«We are sincerely sorry for this incident and the concern it causes for our customers,» the company said in its filing. «We, GoDaddy leadership and employees, take our responsibility to protect our customers’ data very seriously and never want to let them down. We will learn from this incident and are already taking steps to strengthen our provisioning system with additional layers of protection.»

In 2017, the company revoked thousands of SSL certificates after issuing them without proper checks and authorization. In January 2019, an independent researcher found a vulnerability in its process for handling DNS change requests that enabled hackers to hijack domains and create phishing campaigns. It also notified customers of a hack that exposed SSH login details in the same year.

Schwarz Group has announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Israeli cloud cyber security startup XM Cyber for a reported $700 million, as the EU retail giant looks to grow its digital business.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, XM Cyber specialises in proactive prevention of cyber-attacks using the attacker’s perspective. By discovering critical attack paths across on-premises and multi-cloud networks, the firm’s solutions aim to help organisations close security gaps before systems are compromised.

Christian Müller, chief information officer of Schwarz Group, said the addition of XM Cyber adds a “deep technical understanding and innovation” that will compliment Schwarz’ existing portfolio for advanced cybersecurity services.

“Finding and closing security gaps from an attacker’s perspective is a disruptive approach to the way organisations can proactively protect their networks,” he said. “XM Cyber’s solution builds on our strong IT security to further protect our customers, partners, and ourselves as a company.“

Headquartered in Germany, Schwarz Group has become one of the world’s largest retailers, known particularly for its ownership of EU staples such as Lidl and Kaufland supermarkets.

The group said XM Cyber’s comprehensive knowledge in securing complex hybrid cloud networks was a driving factor behind the acquisition, with the startup set to boost the groups expanding digital venture.

Upon completion of the acquisition, XM Cyber will continue to operate independently with its current branding, full suite of products, and support structure, it added.

Noam Erez, co-founder and CEO of XM Cyber, says the move will provide its business with “immense potential” to further expand and develop its business model.

“We are thrilled to become part of the Schwarz Group,” he said. “With the backing and international footprint of the largest European retailer, we can accelerate innovation and growth and further strengthen our position in the global cybersecurity market.”

Many organisations have now adopted a hybrid cloud strategy to ensure their workloads run as efficiently as possible and reside where it makes the most sense. Indeed, according to Flexera research, 82% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, while businesses are increasing their spending with vendors across the board.

Having workloads and applications running in either the public cloud or private presents challenges, however. One of the biggest is how to manage hybrid cloud environments efficiently and to ensure these configurations are as optimised as possible to ensure value for money, and maintain cyber security. To optimise hybrid cloud infrastructure, the right foundations must be in place.

What causes hybrid cloud inefficiency?

If you were starting a business from scratch in today’s age, you’d probably opt to design it to be cloud-native and compatible with the public cloud. This is alongside including lightweight apps, scalable systems and the security and compliance that now comes as standard from the hyperscalers like AWS.

Most companies, however, particularly in regulated industries, are dealing with heavy, legacy, mainframe-based systems, according to Anthony Drake, operations director for North Europe with research and advisory firm ISG. In some cases, these environments host thousands of applications that are completely bespoke to that business. They might have been designed decades ago, and simply aren’t built to be suitable for public cloud environments, he says.

“Companies want the advantages that come from public cloud environments: the ability to scale; the shift from CapEx to OpEx and the ability to manage costs; testing new apps; and the potential benefits that the hyperscalers might bring to growing areas like edge computing,” he explains. “They, therefore, opt for a hybrid environment, putting some workloads into public cloud and retaining private cloud for legacy systems.”

By its nature, a hybrid cloud environment is going to be complex as you get, with public and private cloud environments talking to each other, transferring data, and demanding a level of interoperability that needs to be managed. “A big bang approach of moving everything to the cloud won’t work,” he adds. “It’s a gradual process, split into phases.”

Building suitable hybrid cloud resources 

Establishing the right foundations for hybrid cloud management is essential to optimising operations. There are two main issues that could come into play if businesses fail to do so, according to Guy Warren, CEO of ITRS Group. “You could end up paying excessively for your cloud estate, or you could underestimate your capacity needs and throttle the throughput on that application,” he says. “Securing the foundations requires knowing what size to buy, which, with the complexity of systems today, can only be achieved with effective analysis by a capacity management tool.”

Working to a cloud adoption framework gives a clear line of the best practice, taking into consideration the service infrastructure that’s trying to be replicated into the cloud environment. Each cloud platform has its own framework of excellence and is consumed in different ways, which demands a review of the reasons why a business is moving to the cloud in the first place.

Performing a detailed cost-benefit analysis is key to deciding whether an application would be better in a cloud environment, or situated on-premise, according to George McKenna, head of cloud sales at Ultima Business Solutions. “For example,” he asks, “do the desired benefits come down to revenue generation, internal infrastructure, employee productivity or another reason? It’s the ecosystem of the platform that differentiates where you place the workload.”

Managing director at BCG Platinion, Andreas Rindler, meanwhile, says businesses should be developing the skill, talent and IT organisations that will build “critical mass» to enable a multi-cloud journey. “A company’s ability to build a critical mass of skill for each cloud service provider may impact its multi-cloud strategy,” he continues. “Firms should initially centralise all key scarce competencies in a ‘Cloud CoE’ to maximise efficiency and efficacy. Multi-cloud requires investment in cloud engineering, containerisation, and DevOps tooling to ensure application portability and to avoid vendor lock-in. Many challenges come with this due to the digital skills shortage.”

Drake adds that migration isn’t the end of the hybrid cloud journey, suggesting you need people who can support you as you scale and can take advantage of different features that are introduced by the cloud provider. “Think about how you want to do that,” he says. “Do you want to build a 30-person team in-house with limited career progression, for example?”

Overcoming pitfalls of hybrid cloud optimisation

Managing cloud environments consistently is a complex task. Rindler says that as enterprises continue to migrate apps to multiple clouds, a growing challenge is to manage and understand how company assets are being deployed, used, or exploited. 

“This calls on creating a central portal to view and manage our multi-cloud environment – an agnostic single pane of glass into the various clouds,” he says. “Organisations can also consider implementing a hybrid and multi-cloud management platform.”

Another pain point is portability between clouds. Applications can be migrated following a value-based approach, while maximally leveraging open source technologies can also help to enhance the portability of applications, Rindler continues.

How would your business know, however, when its hybrid cloud management is fully optimised? For Drake, one indication is probably when your business resides exclusively in the public cloud. “The use of private cloud will decrease in the future,” he projects. “The more organisations move to the public cloud, the more they can take advantage of the benefits brought by developing technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI),” he adds.

For Rindler, meanwhile, it’s down to the IT leadership to decide if the benefits of multi-cloud configurations outweigh the costs and risks. “The benefits are simple and very effective; access to best-in-class offerings (and faster time-to-market as a result), reduced vendor lock-in and cost optimisation of workload placement and resiliency across multiple cloud platforms,” he says. However, he adds, with that comes the very real threat of a step-change in the complexity of processes and governance related to cloud, ongoing investments, increased risks and longer roadmaps to get them right.

What does your workstation look like; three monitors powered by a laptop, a desktop surrounded by the latest mic and cameras, or perhaps just a laptop with an external mouse and keyboard? Regardless of how you work, I’ll hedge my bets and say the way you complete your daily tasks has changed somewhat since 2019. 

Without leading us down the well-trodden path of how the pandemic has changed the way we work, it’s important to establish how the effects of COVID-19 on the workplace still manifest. The rise of cloud platforms and portals businesses were forced to adopt to continue functioning during lockdowns is arguably the biggest impact we’ve seen. This is exemplified by the fact a quarter of a billion people now use Microsoft Teams on a monthly basis. 

Even 250 million active monthly users, however, doesn’t translate into total market domination. In fact, over the past year, businesses have increasingly bought into an emerging trend of choosing different collaboration platforms for different types of workplace communication. Companies such as BT and Vodafone, for example, are using Facebook Workplace to offer employees a pseudo-social media experience. There’s a risk, however, that piling yet more digital systems onto the shoulders of already digitally stretched workers might inadvertently lead to a loss of productivity and disillusionment.

No plan is an island

Using such platforms in this way isn’t a new phenomenon, Meike Escherich, associate research director for the future of work at IDC, points out. Indeed, communicating with a distributed workforce means businesses need to upgrade their communications methods, with emailed newsletters and bulletins often ending up in spam folders too. 

“The biggest issue is that staff can be given all they need to do their job in a remote setting, but they’re missing the culture of the company,” Escherich says. “That sense of community, building loyalty, and support from superiors have all gone down the drain over the last year or so because businesses haven’t worked out how they communicate, how often they communicate, and what they communicate. This is a big issue for businesses to tackle.”

Although the intention to supplement workplace culture might be there, introducing yet another digital platform can also take its toll. Depending on their department, employees will have to log into a range of systems at once, which inevitably has a knock-on effect on productivity. In fact, RingCentral found roughly two-thirds of employees are losing over a month of their time per year just switching between different platforms. Its research also found that a large portion of employees found navigating these different platforms more annoying than spam and junk emails (45%), paying bills (52%) and even trying to lose weight (50%).

“Generally, the industry needs to recognise that none of these tools can be an island anymore,” says principal analyst for workplace transformation at CCS Insights, Angela Ashenden. “These platform providers need to look at how they fit within the ecosystem. If you’re going to enable productivity and enable people to be effective it has to tie in with all the other processes and happen wherever those processes take place. Therefore, there’s a focus around integration and how to streamline workflows across multiple tools.”

That is where collaboration platforms come in. Microsoft, for example, wants Teams to serve as a user interface window, senior analyst with Cavell Group Patrick Watson, says. Employees will, effectively, use Teams as a window into their applications, with integrations getting much better. If various providers integrate into Teams or Slack, he adds, users won’t feel bombarded by different apps because they’re effectively using one interface.

Dispelling the threat of shadow IT 

Although the likes of Vodafone and BT may well have good reasons for investing in Workplace, Escherich says she doesn’t think the trend of using more than one collaboration platform will be picked up by smaller businesses. The priority, for them, is to protect their IT teams, who would be burdened with a greater workload. “When we ask our clients about digital transformation and what is needed in-house to enable a hybrid workplace, the key issue is IT support,” she says. “It’s a big issue for business and even outstrips things like security or employee experience.”

Making such a decision may not be as simple as protecting IT teams, though, with shadow IT highly prevalent in regulated industries such as finance, legal and the public sector. As Watson outlines, establishing places for employees to go for both professional and social interactions is likely an attempt to control the realm of all employee interactions, as they may not currently know what’s being shared, how, and when. According to data Watson shares, 39% of executives in charge of technology know their business is currently using Facebook Messenger, 58% are using WhatsApp, with 10% using Signal and 20% using Telegram. 

“As you can see, there’s a large uptake of the consumer applications from employees, but those are just the ones the business owner or the technology executive knows about,” he adds. “These executives won’t necessarily have a clue about these sorts of shadow IT issues, such as the warehouse with its own private Whatsapp group. Within those groups, too, employees could be talking about orders and potentially sharing customer data, which is a dangerous area for businesses. That’s why we have seen a ban of applications like WhatsApp and Telegram, particularly compliance industries.”

Although there may be an appetite to phase out messaging platforms in the workplace, according to data from CCS Insights, WhatsApp is the third most popular collaboration platform after Teams and Zoom. Ashenden concludes that, by separating the social and professional aspects of the office, businesses are shepherding their employees away from private messaging platforms towards mobile-friendly solutions. 

“Teams, Slack, Workplace all provide a simple chat messaging capability within a managed environment, which is why the likes of Microsoft, Facebook and Google are investing in mobile apps and that lightweight chat. The high-turnover workforce isn’t going to buy into a productivity platform, but they might use an app if it’s easy and they can use it on their personal phone. That’s definitely one of the key pieces to this puzzle.”

HP has launched a subscription management service to make it easier for SMBs to manage Microsoft cloud-based licensing, following the release of Windows 365 earlier this year.

HP Subscription Management Service is designed for small and medium-sized companies to make software investment decisions based on reliable workforce intelligence. The service provides license management of Microsoft 365 as well as the full list of Microsoft cloud subscription services.

The product displays online visibility of software analytics and usage trending by user, department, or geography, helping IT teams to easily shift and scale their subscriptions as needed, said HP.

For channel partners, the new service offers a one-stop cloud-based product that allows them to sell Microsoft 365 and the full Microsoft cloud subscription library to their customers, along with HP’s licensing analytics and its premier partner support.

The company said there are additional features to help companies reduce costs and administration overheads too, while increasing security and compliance. HP customers can flex licenses up or down through pay-as-you-go subscription options, ensuring software spend is the right size as business needs change.

Through HP Subscription Management, companies can also secure their workforce from wherever they work with cloud security health checks optimised for the hybrid workplace.

“While IT leaders see managing costs and usage of SaaS applications as a top business priority, more than half still rely on dated internal tools and manual spreadsheets to track and monitor their subscriptions and renewals,” said Sumeer Chandra, global head and general manager of personal systems services at HP.

“As a result, it’s challenging for IT to know when renewals are happening, or how much is being spent on software licenses.”

The HP Subscription Management Service is expected to be available in the UK, France, Germany, and Chile by the end of 2021, whereas the US and additional countries will have to wait until the first quarter of 2022.

As part of the announcement, HP is also launching an Enablement Service for Windows Autopilot to help automate new device setup across the internet with little or no need to touch the device, a simpler and faster way for SMBs to provision new Windows 10 or Windows 11 hardware.

Additionally, it’s releasing HP Proactive Insights Experience Management to make it easy for IT teams to gauge employee sentiment and perceptions in the context of their IT environment.

Lastly, it revealed its Enhancement to HP Proactive Insights, providing advanced remediation capabilities like new security, system stability, and performance optimisations through automatic updates.

The launch of HP’s products follows the release of Windows 365 in August, Microsoft’s PC as a service offering, offering benefits like remote access to virtual endpoints, apps, and data from any device registered with Microsoft Cloud. This reduces the need for businesses to invest in virtual desktop infrastructure, cuts hardware costs, and makes patch management simpler for IT teams.

​Windows 10 users can now expect half the amount of updates, with Microsoft announcing that the operating system is shifting to an annual release cycle similar to Windows 11.

The move is expected to minimise the time spent downloading, restarting, and configuring the updates, which is often seen as troublesome and time-consuming by users.

Coinciding with the release of the Windows 10 21H2 update, Windows Servicing and Delivery VP of Product Management, John Cable, stated that Microsoft “will transition to a new Windows 10 release cadence to align with the Windows 11 cadence, targeting annual feature update releases”.

Following the release of Windows 11 on 4 October, it was announced that the latest iteration of the flagship operating system would move to an annual feature update system similar to that of macOS.

As a result, rather than spring 2022, users can expect the next Windows 10 feature update “in the second half of 2022”, Cable announced in a company blog post.

“As a second half (H2) of the calendar year release, Home and Pro editions of the November 2021 Update will receive 18 months of servicing and support, and Enterprise and Education editions will receive 30 months of servicing and support beginning today,” he stated.

Windows 10 updates are to be supported until the operating system’s end of life date, which is scheduled for 14 October 2025. After that, Microsoft will not be providing technical support, software updates or security updates or fixes for Windows 10. 

The latest Windows 10 update, which is available to download now from the Windows Update settings, includes stronger security to prevent attacks while using Wi-Fi networks, as well as an enhanced Universal Print feature that allows enterprise clients to handle print jobs of up to one gigabyte. Moreover, Microsoft announced that its users will now be able to use the Azure Virtual Desktop service to provision apps to cloud-based Windows 10.

“We continue to listen to customer feedback to adapt Windows to meet your needs as part of our ongoing support for Windows 10, and have scoped the November 2021 Update to focus on productivity, management and security,” said Cable, adding that Microsoft “will be throttling up availability over the coming weeks to ensure a reliable download experience for all”.

Slack has doubled down on its ‘digital HQ‘ plans with the launch of new features to help any user customise their workflow, no matter their technical prowess. 

At its Frontiers conference this week, Slack said it had «completely rebuilt and re-engineered» its communications platform from the ground up in a bid to empower users to make work life simpler and more productive. 

This includes automated and no code functions that enable organisations to tailor their Slack app to suit. The idea of a ‘virtual HQ’ is to place a common space (a digital one) at the heart of a dispersed workforce, but like a physical office, Slack is implementing ways to change its platform to suit an organisation. 

«Just like no two businesses run the same, no two digital HQs are alike,» the company said. «Teams need the ability to tailor solutions based on their unique business needs and we’re on a mission to make that happen.

«In fact, we’ve already seen thousands of organisations like Noom use Workflow Builder to automate routine onboarding tasks and offer essential resources to new hires, saving time while achieving 100% new-hire engagement.» 

The Workflow Builder is a core element of the new Slack platform, which allows users to automate work for themselves and other members of their team – all without the need to write code. The key here is that anyone within the organisation can create a workflow in Slack, simply by dragging and dropping existing apps and customising the way they work to suit. According to Slack, since Workflow Builder launched, more than 400,000 users have built workflows, with 80% of customers building workflows in their digital HQs being non-developers.

The communication platform also revealed ‘Sign in with Slack links’, which is set to be released next year. This allows users to seamlessly connect their tools using Slack account information. There’s also ‘Subscribe in Slack’, a tool to add notifications from other third-party apps that are integrated into a user’s Slack workspace. 

Slack-first app deployment will let developers host and store the data that powers their apps in Slack and be able to attach «invisible metadata’ to their messages. The benefit here is that other apps will be able to communicate with each other via Slack; for example, the different calendar apps of two people at two different companies can directly talk to each other and schedule a meeting through Slack when they’re linked through Slack Connect. 

«Everyday Slack users can now build and automate workflows for their teams without leaning on IT or writing any code. For developers, not only are they now free to focus on more interesting work, we’ve cut their deployment time down from days to minutes,» said Steve Wood, Slack’s VP of product, developer platform 

There are also new additions for Slack Connect, the platform’s external communication feature. Coming early next year, users will be able to collaborate with up to 250 organisations in one channel. And, later in the year, customers will have the ability to set up secure work environments for large, complex projects with thousands of partners right in Slack. 

«Whether you’re planning a large-scale event like Dreamforce with hundreds of vendors or managing a multi-year construction project spanning thousands of vendors, everyone has access to the channels, apps and people needed to get their jobs done,» Slack said. «This gives teams a monumental leap forward in collaboration, flexibility and control.» 

IBM has unveiled its latest and most powerful quantum computing chip to date, the 127-qubit Eagle processor.

Announcing the new piece of hardware at IBM Quantum Summit, it’s the first quantum chip developed by the company that surpasses 100 qubits.

Eagle is built using a new 3D packaging architecture developed by IBM which it says can support the development of future, more advanced quantum processors up to and including its proposed 1,126-qubit Condor chip, due for release in 2023.

The architecture is based on a heavy-hexagonal qubit layout – a setup that sees a qubit connecting to two or three neighbours. This configuration decreases the potential for errors caused by interacting neighbours and provides significant boosts in yielding functional processors, IBM said.

The architecture also places the qubits on a single layer while other components sit on different levels in a ‘stacked’ formation. 

The processor will be available to select members of the IBM Quantum Network starting in December.

The IBM Quantum Network is a collection of Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, startups, and national research labs that work with IBM to advance the field of quantum computing. 

As part of IBM Quantum’s roadmap, Condor will mark a significant step in hardware advancements but further development depends on whether commercial dilution refrigerators can rise to the task of cooling such large, complex devices.

That said, the second announcement IBM made at its Quantum Summit may help towards that goal. The IBM Quantum System Two is designed to work with processors exceeding 1,000 qubits and will feature a more modular design with an overhauled cryogenic platform to optimise cooling performance.

IBM is on track to launch the system by 2023 which will help increase the scale of its chips.

The quantum computing capabilities of Eagle far exceed those of classical computers, Arvind Krishna, CEO at IBM, told HBO.

Classical computers encode information into bits represented as either a 1 or 0, while quantum computers encode information using a quantum superposition of a 1 and 0. This means information can be seen as representing a 1 or 0 – not both at the same time – a superposition is broken down to reveal a probability of revealing a 1 or 0.

The method of encoding allows quantum computers to process more complex tasks. Classical computers will work through problems in an order but quantum computers will approach problems differently, modelling all potential workloads and workstreams at once to generate answers much quicker. 

It makes quantum computing ideal for working through large data sets and for tasks such as cracking cryptographic keys, for example.

Of all the tools underpinning modern IT management, VNC may be one of the most prolific. First developed in the mid-1990s by RealVNC, it’s spent the past three decades enabling IT teams to access remote systems throughout their estate, and has found its way into the toolbelt of every support technician.

It may seem like a simple tool – and in many ways, it is. The underlying RFB protocol that powers VNC-based remote access tools hasn’t changed all that much since it was first introduced, and although its open-source origins have resulted in a huge number of different VNC solutions, they all share most of the same core capabilities. 

This can lead many organisations to treat remote access software as ”part of the furniture”; something that’s useful to have around, but not worth giving any particular thought or consideration to. Indeed, when selecting a VNC solution, many IT professionals simply gravitate towards the first option that comes to mind.

However, while remote access software may not necessarily be a transformative part of your IT stack, selecting a provider should be given a significant amount of scrutiny. Not only is it a foundational part of many operational tasks, making the wrong choice can have serious potential consequences further down the line, and there are a number of important questions that any IT department should be asking of their potential partners.

For instance, certain options may present unforeseen logistical challenges, like platform compatibility. Just because your chosen flavour of remote access software allows technicians to access Windows desktops doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to play nicely with every operating system, and that could be a problem if you also need to access Linux-based servers. Some providers will even support connections from mobile devices, giving technicians remote access even while on the go.

Deployment is also something that bears consideration. If you’re managing a large fleet of devices, you’ll need a remote access provider that supports automated remote configuration and deployment. If not, support staff will be faced with the tedious prospect of manually installing agents on every machine, one by one. Alternatively, you may want to opt for a provider that offers agentless, on-demand connections to reduce on-device footprints.

Connectivity, meanwhile, is frequently one of the most frustrating elements of IT support, particularly with remote access software that involves laboriously configuring firewalls and port access rules to permit connections. Modern enterprise-level vendors like RealVNC, by contrast, offer cloud-based connection brokering that bypasses fiddly firewall customisation, as well as direct peer-to-peer connections for high-security, privacy-conscious or offline environments.

You should look at performance, too. While the fundamental technology underpinning VNC may not have changed all that much in the last 30 years, it isn’t always implemented as efficiently as it could be, so pay attention to any performance guarantees offered by vendors in order to ensure that your remote sessions are as seamless as possible. 

The biggest area of focus, however, should be security. The purpose of remote access software is to give IT teams an easy way to interact with systems from wherever they are, including back-end servers as well as employee desktops and laptops. By definition, then, this software will likely be installed on most – if not all – of a company’s machines. 

While this is convenient for providing support to colleagues, it can be a double-edged sword under the wrong circumstances. If your technicians can access every computer in your estate from anywhere in the world, it also means that if an intruder gains access to your systems, then they can too. Think of it like giving your neighbour a spare key to your house; it can come in handy for a great many things, but you have to be absolutely certain that you trust them to keep it safe.

This isn’t just about making sure that potential suppliers provide robust privilege management and account authentication options – although these are essential for preventing account takeovers and exploitation by insider threats. It’s also about making sure you trust the security of the software itself.

Open source technology has a reasonably good record for security, but instances like the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug prove that it’s not immune from being compromised. Commercial vendors, on the other hand, can take the foundation created by open source protocols and layer additional protections on top of it, as well as proactively monitoring for potential bugs and vulnerabilities before they become an issue.

Of course, that’s not to say that vendors should be implicitly trusted. Over the last several years, we’ve seen a number of high-profile supply chain attacks on vendors like Kaseya, Solarwinds and more, which have allowed hackers to smuggle malware into customers’ environments. It’s therefore prudent to treat all vendors with a healthy dose of scepticism and to make sure that you’re comfortable with the level of security they offer, as well as the data they’re collecting and storing from your activity.

RealVNC’s offering, VNC Connect, has been built from the ground up for business deployments, specifically tailored to meet these needs. It offers a wide range of automated deployment options, integration with existing enterprise tools, comprehensive platform support and a battery of security protection, including 256-bit AES encryption, multi-factor authentication and granular permissions controls.

It’s also built by the original authors of the RFB protocol, so it’s optimised for performance with patented technology to help keep connections stable even when faced with low bandwidth. It also includes printing, chat and file transfer functionality, and a robust management console.

Remote access software may not be the newest technology in the world of IT, and it’s certainly not the sexiest – but that doesn’t make it any less important. It’s one of the most versatile and widely-used IT tools in the world, and it deserves to be chosen with an appropriate level of care. You wouldn’t leave the keys to your house under the doormat – so don’t do the same with the keys to your IT estate.

Learn more about RealVNC’s services