Page 3 - SkypeBuzz Test

2nd Quarter 2016
SkypeBuzz by Telecom Reseller 3
Keeping your Lync/Skype Business Environment safe from Ransomware
Solving the

Application
WHAT IS RANSOMWARE?
susceptible to ransomware - if not more so.
Network Ransomware is any type of malicious
David Bergquist
Businesses, or course, host high volumes of
so ware that infects a computer system users which increases the chance that someone
Disconnect
restricting access in some way, demanding
may open an e-mail containing one of these by, UC Engineer at Enabling
that the user pay a “ransom” to remove the attack vectors. Furthermore, business host
Technologies Corp. (www.
restriction. “Locky” is a type of Ransomware and house personal computers (PC’s) and enablingtechcorp.com)
Branko Miskov
that is relatively new to the scene. “Locky”,
servers. Some aspects of businesses cannot
as an example, encrypts the users’ les using them to be used to restore les that have been function properly without computers or the
by Branko Miskov, VP of Product AES encryption and then demands payment encrypted! Nasty stu , to say the least. So how data they contain. is is where ransomware
Marketing at Exinda (www.exinda. through some form of digital currency service does it propagate? Ransomware is primarily takes advantage making users and businesses
com)
to decrypt the user les. Ransomware targets distributed via emails including attachments; alike pay a fee to return to normal operations.
Mlarge amounts of le extensions, and even more however, it can also be distributed via fake e thought is to make the fee an amount that
ore and more of your business critical importantly can encrypt data on unmapped update popups such as Flash Flayer, Adobe is feasible where the business would end up
applications have moved to the cloud. network shares. Ransomware can completely Reader, or Java Runtime, when browsing web losing more if they didn’t pay to have access to
You might have started with Salesforce
change the name of your les in addition
sites.
their data. If precautions haven’t been taken, it
and slowly added more applications like Skype for to encrypting and moving them, making it We are a Business, we are safe!
only requires a single user in the organization
Business or O ce 365. ese apps that once lived very di cult to restore your data. As if this A common misconception is that this type opening an email containing one of these
in your data centre or on your desktop are now
wasn’t enough, ransomware can also delete of malware targets single users. However,
in the cloud. is is not only indicative of today’s your Shadow Volume Copies - disallowing
businesses are commonly targeted and just as
CONTINUES ON PAGE 3
environment, but also of more to come.
Since migrating to the cloud, one of the biggest
challenges we’re hearing from our customers is
that applications no longer behave reliably or
consistently. When applications reside on your
network you have a large amount of bandwidth
and resources that you can control to improve
performance. But once you move to the cloud
you introduce a number of other factors that
can potentially impede the performance of that
application and adversely a ect user Quality of
Experience (QX).
And once QX is impacted, employee adoption
su ers. Which isn’t really surprising. Would you
rather deal with dropped call a er dropped call
using Skype for Business or just pick up your
mobile phone? If an application doesn’t perform
reliably it forces users to move to other methods
or apps that will get the job done. is is one of
IT’s biggest problems - ‘Shadow IT.’
Generally, when we talk about improving Quality
of Experience today the focus is on tra c shaping
within the network to prioritize applications
and ensure bandwidth. A lot of organizations
do this today, they create QoS policies in order
to prioritize and safeguard that app by ensuring
unsanctioned tra c doesn’t interfere. Which is
a viable solution if the problem exists within the
network, but troubleshooting applications in the
cloud can be much more challenging.

THE DISCONNECT
In the IT environment there is group responsible
for managing applications in the cloud and,
typically, a separate group that is responsible for
managing the network. When a problem occurs
each group has a piece of the puzzle, but are le
without a complete picture and can only see
one part of the problem. is is when the nger
pointing begins and regardless of whether it is the
network causing the issue, it is usually targeted as
the rst source.
Enterprises are struggling to control cloud-
based applications because they simply don’t have
the right tools. ere is no visibility beyond the
network edge. e biggest sore spot for these IT
teams is having to troubleshoot the application
and network separately in an attempt to pinpoint
where the issue is. Is it the application or is it the
network? And not only that, but how do you x
it? A er you gure it all out, the time to resolve
can take 3 or more hours.

CLOSING THE GAP
So what’s the secret? e key to ensuring Quality
of Experience is gaining end-to-end visibility
and control across the entire application path
including both the network and the service. You
need to be able to gather data not only from the
network, but from the application itself in order
to provide the same level of visibility as with in-
house datacenter apps.
If you can correlate application data with
network information for a complete end-to-end
view of tra c, down to the device level, you will
be able to pinpoint and quickly resolve issues
before they adversely impact the network. n