September 16, 2020
2 Min Read
While the world continues to adjust with the economic, educational, and societal challenges that COVID-19 has wrought over since February, there are glimmering signs of optimism on the horizon. Children are returning to school, but in a very uneven manner as parents remain concerned about the “safeness” of educational institutions. In short, the world appears to be recovering, but much work must be done.
At Absolute, we recognize that we play a unique and ongoing role in aiding companies and schools during this recovery period. Remote working and distance learning have become much more than catchphrases during the past seven months. Even after the world fully recovers from COVID-19, there is the highest likelihood that the way we work and educate our children will remain dramatically different from pre-COVID.
The pandemic has exacerbated the work of cybercriminals, who have been diligent about exploiting COVID-19. They are notoriously creative in conjuring up new ways to successfully and silently steal sensitive data. Both the enterprise and school districts, particularly K-12, also put themselves at risk when devices go missing because of the replacement costs of missing units but even more importantly, the data that resides on them.
In response to these challenges, Absolute has announced limited-time offers for customers to purchase essential add-on features, including Absolute’s Application Persistence service and Absolute Persistence portfolio, which was previously available only with the company’s premier Resilience edition.
Simultaneously, Absolute is extending its previously announced COVID-19 related support offers to its existing customers, which provide self-healing ability for virtual private networks (VPN), as well as the capability to more seamlessly secure, manage and patch remote devices at no additional cost through October 30, 2020. These new product offers and extension of no-cost access provide businesses and education institutions with a remarkable opportunity to mitigate the security challenges that IT and security managers face as remote working and distance learning usage models have grown in popularity.
In particular, Absolute’s Application Persistence service deserves special mention. This ground-breaking service allows customers to self-heal more than 40 industry-leading security and productivity applications to confirm they remain healthy, active, and undeletable. The significance of this capability for IT and Security managers, principally with remote workers, is impossible to understate as it allows IT personnel to identify in real-time if mission-critical controls are missing, disabled or not working as intended.
Moreover, Absolute’s Reach capability provides a comprehensive library of more than 130 automated, custom workflows that allow IT and Security teams to effortlessly run reports and queries and take immediate widespread remedial actions. The best example of this is the ability to enforce urgent patch installations and enabling (or repairing) VPN applications, even if a device is viewed as “offline” by the corporate network.
There are tangible, evidentiary data points that underscore the impact of Absolute’s offerings. The company’s Impact of COVID-19 on Remote Work and Distance Learning Center dashboard reports (using anonymized data aggregated from more than 9 million Absolute-enabled endpoints) that the average delay for deploying the latest patches to Windows 10 enterprise devices is an alarming 79 days. Nearly one in four (24%) enterprise devices had a VPN considered to be out of compliance. Conversely, Absolute reported that enterprise customers with Absolute’s Application Persistence service turned on had the percentage of devices with healthy and compliant VPN jump to a much more reassuring 96% during comparable periods.
In short, Absolute is committed to doing its part in helping enterprise and educational institutions enhance their security postures amid these remote work and distance learning usage model changes that COVID-19 has accelerated. To learn more about Absolute’s Application Persistence tools for VPN, as well as details on how to take advantage of this extended offer, visit here. Details on Absolute’s Reach capabilities, including the promotional offers described above, can be found here.
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