2012 Make or Break Year for Windows Migrations

2012 is an Olympic year, not just for the games in London, but Avecto predicts also for organizations planning Windows 7 roll outs to get it right.

Avecto today predicted that 2012 is the year organizations need to concentrate on getting their Microsoft migrations right, or risk being out of the game. The leader in privilege management warned, with Windows XP expected to have been phased out by 2014, organizations must 'get it right' as they migrate across to Windows 7.

Avecto's co-founder and chief technology officer, Mark Austin, stated, "Today's workforce is increasingly mobile, and demands devices to facilitate this. With the Windows 7 - and even Windows 8 - operating systems, Microsoft is enabling this trend and most enterprises are either in the process or planning to migrate across. However it is a complex process, with many pitfalls, and getting it wrong can be expensive and inherently risky." Avecto's advice is to, "Act now, and invest in the right technology, to make your migration secure, cost-effective and easy to manage."

Avecto is also predicting an increased focus on endpoint security. It believes corporates will need to re-embrace solutions that are able to detect the criminals' increasingly diverse arsenal of threats, crucial in the battle against stealthy and persistent malware. In fact, with many malware attacks mitigated and even eliminated with better control over application execution and user privileges, the adoption of application control and privilege management solutions within the operating system will increase in order to provide a more pro-active approach to endpoint security.

In its final prediction Avecto anticipates that compliance will be the key differentiator for cloud based providers in 2012. Austin concludes, "If cloud providers are to appeal to customers in highly regulated industries then administrator access, and their actions on servers in the data-centres, needs to be better controlled and monitored. The security of servers in the data-centres of cloud providers will drive more innovative security offerings at the hypervisor level. This in turn will then allow the security software to get a complete view of the hosted servers, especially when dealing with stealthy attacks."