Dailymotion is a French news and entertainment video streaming platform with nearly 400 million unique visitors each month. Founded in 2005, Dailymotion is owned by Vivendi and headquartered in Paris, France, with offices in New York and Singapore.
The Story
Meeting the Challenges of a Remote Device Fleet
Managing a fleet of several hundred machines is a challenging task, even more so when these devices are in multiple sites and countries. At Dailymotion, the IT team must provide an efficient working environment and support services to 350 employees around the world. “Most of our employees are in France, but we also have teams in the United States and Asia,” explains Frédéric Warest, IT Specialist at Dailymotion. “The entire management of the fleet is carried out from the head office in Paris, and this is a fairly time-consuming task.”
Since remote work has become a common practice, things can get tricky, especially when it comes to data protection. When it comes to endpoint management, the team had some tools to intervene remotely on the devices, but the new era of work-from-anywhere gave rise to two issues. The first issue is around the subject of deployment and maintenance operations. “Users had to be connected to the local network to receive tools and system updates. But remote workers do not always connect to the VPN because they don’t always need it to work. In this case, they were not receiving the necessary updates, especially security patches.” Secondly, remote working logically leads to devices leaving the company, which exposes them to the risk of loss or theft. “Even if the data is protected by an encryption mechanism, we wanted to provide maximum security by also protecting the computers themselves,” stresses Frédéric.
The Solutions
How They Did It
A Natively Integrated, Persistent Agent
Equipped with Dell computers, Dailymotion became interested in the Absolute Secure Endpoint solution, which is factory-embedded in the firmware of the manufacturer’s PCs. Thanks to a partnership with 28 systems manufacturers worldwide, Absolute’s Persistence® technology is present in over 600 million devices. “The Absolute Persistence technology is integrated into the device’s bios at the time of purchase. All that is required is to activate it via a Group Policy Object in the Active Directory. The policy can be created and applied to the workstations in less than an hour.” On top of the speed and simplicity of implementation, the Dailymotion team is attracted to the Persistence technology’s resilience to tampering attempts. “Even if the operating system is fully reinstalled, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated, the Absolute Persistence technology cannot be deleted and will automatically reactivate itself.”
Track and Recover Lost Devices
From a practical point of view, Absolute Secure Endpoint also met the company’s needs. The solution allows for deployments on devices, even if they are not connected to the internal network. Subsequently, Absolute Secure Endpoint will give administrators the ability to find, block, or format a lost or stolen computer. “First, we freeze the machine. When it is switched on, it cannot be used anymore, and the screen shows a message with the company’s details. We have already recovered a few computers in this way, when the computer has been forgotten somewhere,” says Frédéric. If this first step is unsuccessful, it is then possible to launch a remote formatting of the drive, to make sure that no data can be recovered.
Investing in the Resilience of Critical Applications
Cybersecurity is a strategic issue and a major concern for Dailymotion’s management. Dailymotion is now considering extending its use of Absolute Secure Endpoint to other features, including Absolute Application Resilience. “We could use Absolute to make specific applications resilient to external factor like common decay, unintentional deletion, or malicious actions. The auto-repair and auto-reinstall features would allow us to ensure that critical software is always properly installed and never corrupted or deleted,” explains Frédéric.
The Results
Keeping Devices Secure and Protected, No Matter Where They’re Located
With Absolute Secure Endpoint, Dailymotion can ensure their entire device fleet is safely protected, even if a device is lost or stolen. Absolute Secure Endpoint provides organizations with the ability to safeguard their devices, data, and applications.
For Dailymotion, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Provides the IT team with the ability to remotely freeze at-risk devices
- Ensures all Dailymotion devices are protected with an undeletable agent
- Keeps employees’ and subscribers’ data securely protected
- Makes mission-critical applications cyber resilient
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
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