When it comes to Apple in the enterprise, Microsoft wants to make the experience as smooth as possible. At this weeks JNUC2020 event I (virtually) spoke with Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of the Enterprise Client & Mobility (ECM) team, Brad Anderson, who shared insights on his company’s work with Jamf and the emerging new normal of remote work.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the rate of digital transformation, underlining the need for Microsoft to support device choice and improve cloud-based collaboration.

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When it comes to Apple in the enterprise, Microsoft wants to make the experience as smooth as possible. At JNUC2020 event I (virtually) spoke with Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of the Enterprise Client & Mobility (ECM) team, Brad Anderson, who shared insights on his company’s work with Jamf and the emerging new normal of remote work.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the rate of digital transformation, underlining the need for Microsoft to support device choice and improve cloud-based collaboration.

To read this article in full, please click here

COVID-19 means just about everyone who can do so now works from home. But the rapid pace at which this happened put IT under a great deal of pressure, so, what have we learned that may help in future?

The JNUC conference this week sees 15,000 Apple-in-the-enterprise IT staff come together, and a lot of the focus is on the challenges of rapid migration to remote work. The scale of this migration is vast, and it seems to be continuing at pace.

Microsoft Vice President Brad Anderson shared a little data to illustrate this: “We're seeing 1.5 million new devices every seven days coming into the cloud to be managed (by Microsoft Endpoint Manager) and that's Windows, iOS, Mac and Android.” (Italics mine.)

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COVID-19 means just about everyone who can do so now works from home, but the rapid pace at which this happened put IT under a great deal of pressure, so, what have we learned that may help in future?

The JAMF event this week sees 15,000 Apple in the enterprise IT staff come together, and a lot of the take concerns the challenges of rapid migration to remote working.

The scale of this migration is vast, and it seems to be continuing at pace.

Microsoft VP Brad Anderson shared a little data to illustrate this: “We're seeing 1.5 million new devices every seven days coming into the cloud to be managed (by Microsoft Endpoint Manager) and that's Windows, iOS, Mac and Android.” (Italics mine)

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Apple in the enterprise focused company, Jamf, kicked off its virtual JNUC conference today with a deluge of news and information for Mac, iPhone and iPad using enterprises.

The show comes at a pivotal moment in the transformation of enterprise IT. Not only is work becoming virtual, but Apple’s presence in the space continues to grow.

The move to virtual conferences means the event has more attendees than ever before, with around 15,000 people attending, the company said.

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Android's Smart Lock feature is spectacular — that is, when it actually works.

Smart Lock has been around since 2014's Android 5.0 era (which, according to my calculations, was approximately "an eternity" ago by 2020 standards). The basic idea behind it is to make securing your smartphone less inconvenient, thus making it more likely that you'll actually use a pattern, PIN, passcode, or person-paw press (also known as a fingerprint) to keep your data safe. The sensational headlines about big, bad malware monsters lurking in the dark and waiting to pounce on unsuspecting victims may be scary, after all, but here in the real world, you're far more likely to suffer from your own self-made security shortcomings than from any sort of theoretical threat.

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What September’s patching frenzy lacked in fireworks, it more than compensated for in volume – and belligerence. Server 2016 hiccups on Security Options. Win10 version 2004 surprises – Lenovo still hasn’t fixed its Blue Screen-inducing Biometric Security setting; the TRIM function still tries to trim spinning hard disks; for some, Start goes wonky, Action Center disappears, and there’s the usual litany of odd, one-off bug reports.

As of early today, we’re still waiting for the Win10 version 2004 “optional, non-security, C/D/E Week” patch, but all of the other expected September patches are in.

As I’ve mentioned many times, Windows 10 version 2004 shipped with a bug that causes the Windows Optimizer Drives defrag tool to skip updating the completion date on defrag runs. As a result, defrags occur much more frequently than necessary. Microsoft has known about the bug since January – months before 2004 shipped -- but didn’t bother to acknowledge it until a fix appeared this month.

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In an unusual experiment, two European banks (one in Hungary, the other in Spain) are trying to boost security and – nonintuitively – convenience by layering one biometric authentication method on top of another.

The two biometrics are facial recognition and palm recognition – both performed via a mobile device – and the banks are Hungary’s OTP Bank and Spain’s Liberbank; the vendor behind the effort promises imminent deployments in Slovenia and the UK. It's clear that such an approach would theoretically be more secure, but is such a combo going to mean too much friction for the typical customer? Or will users accept a minute amount of additional effort to better safeguard their money?

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The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shift to working from home have brought about numerous technological disruptions, many centered around how organizations deliver IT services to their workforce. Technologies that were dabbled in before, like videoconferencing, have suddenly become standard practice.

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In the time of COVID-19, with so many people working from home, it’s inevitable that many will be using Windows 7 devices. And that’s a big security problem for IT. As of January 2020, Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft. That means no security patches — particularly dangerous at a time when many people are connecting to enterprise networks from their Windows 7 PCs.

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I get it. You’re one of those enterprises that doesn’t (yet) support Apple products among employees, but does that moratorium extend to the C-suite? I’m willing to bet it does not, and that’s why even Windows-only IT shops must learn how to secure Apple’s products.

The reality is that Apple’s products are popular at work. And while there are many businesses that don’t officially support them, one section of civil society that pretty much always does their own thing no matter what are the boys and girls in the C-suite. I can still recall the number of CFOs I spoke with early on in the iPad days who were deeply interested in trying the Apple tablet. Many did. At a time when no one else could.

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A majority of IT administrators polled this summer said that the twice-a-year Windows 10 feature upgrades are not useful – or rarely so – a stunning stance considering how much effort Microsoft puts into building the updates.

About 58% of nearly 500 business professionals who are responsible for servicing Windows at their workplaces said that Windows 10 feature upgrades – two annually, one each in the spring and fall – were either not useful (24%) or rarely useful (34%).

Only 20% contended that the upgrades were useful in some fashion, while a slightly larger chunk – 22% – choose a noncommittal neutral as a response, claiming that the operating system's updates were neither useful nor not useful. (It might be best to consider this answer as undecided since in this binary world if something is not not useful, that must mean it is useful.)

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The COVID-19 pandemic – and the lockdowns that followed last spring – wrought changes across IT operations and strategy as businesses and employees adjusted to a new environment. But what changes were made, and which ones are likely to last?

Spiceworks Ziff Davis, a B2B tech marketplace, polled 1,073 IT buyers in North America and Europe in June and July 2020 to find out. The results in its 2021 State of IT report, released today, show that the pandemic-fueled transformation will continue, affecting both planning and budgets for the long term.

The survey shows that 76% of businesses envision long-term IT changes, with more than half planning to retain flexible work policies (such as remote work); 64% of companies enabled remote work in 2020 due to the pandemic.

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Microsoft has released 129 updates to its Windows ecosystem, but the good news  this month is that we are not responding to any zero-days or publicly reported vulnerabilities. Microsoft appears to be getting serious about removing Adobe Flash Player (a good thing) and we see a very broad update to Windows desktops and servers. Unusually, Microsoft’s browsers are not a huge focus this month, and both the Microsoft Office (excluding SharePoint) and development platform have received only a few, lower profile patches.

We have included a helpful infographic, which this month looks a little lopsided as all of the attention should be on Windows components.

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Someday, you’ll tell your grandkids about the halcyon days of July and August 2020, when Microsoft took pity on us poor patching souls and introduced few bugs in its stew of Patch Tuesday patches.

Now, it looks like we’re well on our way to another mess.

Although it’s still too early to throw up your hands and peremptorily pass on the September crop, I assure you that there is no joy in Patchville.

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Microsoft has launched a public preview of "Microsoft Defender Application Guard for Office," a defensive technology that quarantines untrusted Office documents so that attack code carried by malicious files can't reach the operating system or its applications.

On Monday, a senior cybersecurity engineer with the Redmond, Wash. company explained how Application Guard for Office worked and more importantly, walked customers through its operation – something that existing documentation omitted when the public preview was launched late last month.

"Microsoft Office will open files from potentially unsafe locations in Microsoft Defender Application Guard, a secure container, that is isolated from the device through hardware-based virtualization," John Barbare wrote in a post to a Microsoft blog. "When Microsoft Office opens files in Microsoft Defender Application Guard, a user can then securely read, edit, print, and save the files without having to re-open files outside of the container."

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Every month we see the same pattern: Microsoft releases its Patch Tuesday regimen; the blogosphere flies into a frenzy about security holes that have to be patched right this minute; some patches have bugs; Microsoft fixes many of them in a week or two, warns about others, and stays mum on far too many.

Normal Windows users are left in the lurch. On the one hand, you have the threat of imminent malware mayhem. On the other, you have the threat of poorly tested patches. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

It’s been like that for years. Don’t believe it? Computerworld has month-by-month details for the past three years here.

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Every month we see the same pattern: Microsoft releases its Patch Tuesday regimen; the blogosphere flies into a frenzy about security holes that have to be patched right this minute; some patches have bugs; Microsoft fixes many of them in a week or two, warns about others, and stays mum on far too many.

Normal Windows users are left in the lurch. On the one hand, you have the threat of imminent malware mayhem. On the other, you have the threat of poorly tested patches. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

It’s been like that for years. Don’t believe it? Computerworld has month-by-month details for the past three years here.

To read this article in full, please click here

It looks like we’re good to go with Microsoft's August Windows and Office patches. The second cumulative update for Windows 8.1, KB 4578013, throws some Virtual Private Networks out of kilter, and the Win7 patches may knock out your printers (for those of you paying for Win7 Extended Security Updates). But most of the other bugs appear to be squashed.

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Apple has once again responded to critics with the publication of a human rights policy it says commits the company to “freedom of information and expression.”

“At Apple, we are optimistic about technology’s awesome potential for good,” says CEO Tim Cook. “But we know that it won’t happen on its own. Every day, we work to infuse the devices we make with the humanity that makes us.”

However, the document also points out that Apple is required to obey the law.

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