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In this article we will deal with mobile devices -smartphones and tables- by analyzing Cortado Corporate Server, a commercial product that helps MSP and IT professionals to manage the integration between personal and business devices, be it pure BYOD or situations where the company provides employees and collaborators with devices.

Overview and characteristics
This kind of software is commonly referred to as EMM, or Enterprise Mobility Management, and offers some common features: centralized management of mobile devices (MDM, or Mobile Device Management), management of installed applications, (MAM – Mobile Application Management) and management of on-board data and during the transmission. In addition to these three main characteristics, there are other useful features like secure access and sharing of files and, in the specific case of Cortado, printing straight from the device.

In this article we have selected some of the new features available in Windows Server 2016 with the aim of analysing them and evaluating their impact in a real world scenario.

As we’ve mentioned in the previous issue, this new release is conceived as an improvement of the previous versions, rather than a brand new system. Ne features can be grouped into three ares: Virtualization and Containers, Security and Storage.

Virtualization

The main news in terms of Hyper-V is nested virtualization. With the new Windows Server 2016, Hyper-V hosts can be virtualized (ie a VM with Hyper-V running on it): this approach is often used in testing environments and situations where one wants to create multi-tenant environments without costs related to physical hardware. Now VMs’ hardware hot-add (disks, network cards, controllers, etc..) is supported: this operation was previously available upon powering off machines and restarting them with a subsequent downtime.

A new feature that is introduced with this version is the Host Guardian role, which we discussed in the previous issue. Host Guardian allows to regulate granularly levels and access permissions of Hyper-V administrators on virtual machines running on an host or cluster. Server 2016 also steps towards the Linux world: one of the main problems when creating a Linux VM was the lack of drivers certified for Secure Boot in Windows, which would lead to a “Failed Secure Boot Verification” error when starting the virtual machine; it could be solved by disabling the Secure Boot feature. This new release of Windows Server fixes the problem including such drivers.

CentreStack is a managed server for the creation of an object storage platform that can be deployed between the walls and in Managed Service Provider mode to be offered as a service to clients.

The product of the american Gladinet is a system halfway between classic file servers for companies and off-premises Cloud storage platforms usually used in SaaS/PaaS mode (think of Dropbox, Onedrive, etc..). By taking the best from both worlds, CentreStack can leverage the internal IT infrastructure (servers, storage, etc..) to offer a file sharing service also suitable for BYOD purposes in a Cloud mode. Management indeed is completely Web based with a dashboard from where you can control and act on all aspects of the platform, be it multi-tenant and multi-node as well.

Structure and requirements

CentreStack is composed by three main parts, or nodes: Web Front Node, Worker Node and Database Node. Nodes can be deployed as physical hosts or as separate virtual machines, or in an all-in-one mode on a single host (a solution which is particularly suitable for small dimensions scenarios or testing purposes) where all components are installed at once. In some situations Web Front and Worker nodes can be condensed on a single machine.

The second edition of the Security Barcamp organized by Trend Micro proves to be a very interesting meeting about IT related topics, both on a worldwide and on a more Italian-focused scale.

Rik Ferguson, Trend Micro Vice-President, was the special guest of the event and, in an extended speech, he spoke about the three main threats in the IT field of the moment and which will be in the future.
The most important threat is ransomware for sure. The phenomenon boomed in 2015 and experienced a 400% growth in terms of attack typologies and available families during the following year. The new trend is to refine and improve the attacking techniques with a particular focus on selected business targets (whose data have an important value and can justify the payment of the ransom) and social engineering, which is at the basis of these attacks.