Monday Morning Impact – December 21

CrowdStrike Research Report Reveals Effects of Remote Work on Cybersecurity

CrowdStrike, a Sunnyvale, California-based security vendor, has released its annual Cyber Front Lines Report, which provides an in-depth look into how adversaries are adapting to today’s security realities and offers recommendations for cybersecurity improvement.

The report suggests that intrusions are no longer a one-time event. The research team reported that organizations that experienced an intrusion experienced another intrusion attempt 68% of the time.

In at least 30% of incident response engagements, CrowdStrike observed the organization’s antivirus solutions were either incorrectly configured with weak prevention settings or not fully deployed across the environment, which may have been a factor in the threat actor gaining and maintaining access. Antivirus solutions failed to provide protection in 40% of the incidents.

The company also observed significant increases in attackers targeting public-facing applications and services in 2020. This year brought a staggering increase in volume and velocity of financially motivated attacks. Of these financially motivated attacks, 81% involved the deployment of ransomware or a precursor to ransomware activities, while only 19% included eCrime attacks such as point-of-sale intrusions, ecommerce website attacks, business email compromise and cryptocurrency mining.

“Corporate networks now span both office and home, providing a wealth of new attack surfaces and vectors that adversaries can exploit,” said Shawn Henry, chief security officer and president of CrowdStrike Services at CrowdStrike. “Holistic coordination and continued vigilance are key in detecting and stopping sophisticated intrusions. Because of this, we’re seeing a necessary shift from one-off emergency engagements to continuous monitoring and response. This will better enable incident response teams to help customers drastically reduce the average time to detect, investigate and remediate from 162 hours to less than 60 minutes.”

The CrowdStrike Services Cyber Front Lines Report reflects data derived from CrowdStrike Services incident response, managed services and proactive services engagements over 2020, spanning 15 industry sectors, residing in 34 countries and varied in size from large global organizations to regionally focused small/mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

Channel Impact^®
The report reveals the broad-reaching impact remote work has had on cybersecurity, as corporate networks around the world were turned inside out to accommodate remote workers. This, in turn, had dramatic effects on how attackers targeted organizations and how defenders reacted, especially with the accelerated adoption of cloud infrastructure.

Vodafone Business and RingCentral Announce Strategic Partnership for Cloud-based Communications

Vodafone Business and RingCentral have announced a strategic partnership through which the two companies will create a new co-branded Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution that will be the lead UCaaS solution for Vodafone Business, and also offer Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) to Vodafone Business customers.

The two companies plan to jointly drive product roadmap, innovation, sales enablement and go-to-market. Both companies will contribute resources to this, creating a joint development capability and also leveraging the RingCentral open API platform for custom integrations.

“Our partnership with RingCentral will enable customers to rapidly deploy and easily manage the communications services that are right for them and marks another step forward in our drive to become a platform-based business,” said Vodafone Business CEO Vind Kumar. “Together with RingCentral we can transform ways of working, improve business processes, and help companies become ready for a future of increased remote and flexible working.”

“We’re excited to partner with the leader in mobility and 5G to enable a ‘work from anywhere’ world with a new generation of cloud communications services,” said Anand Eswaran, RingCentral’s President and COO. “Mobility is critical to business success, and together with Vodafone Business, we will bring enterprise customers worldwide the capabilities they need, including team messaging, video meetings, and enterprise-grade voice services, to build the digital communications of the future.”

Vodafone Business and RingCentral will initially introduce new services to customers located in the United Kingdom and for Vodafone Business’ multinational customers in Europe in 2021. Multiple additional countries will follow, including Spain, Germany and Italy.

Channel Impact^®
Bringing together Vodafone Business’ mobile first approach, global brand, reach and scale with RingCentral’s UCaaS and CCaaS expertise is expected to deliver flexible, easy to use and secure services.

Tech Data to Deliver the AWS Partner Transformation Program to IT Providers in the U.S. Public Sector

Tech Data announced that it will offer its partners the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Transformation Program (PTP), a comprehensive assessment, training and enablement program designed to help AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners accelerate the development of an AWS cloud practice.

Developed by AWS in 2018, the PTP is designed to help AWS Partners expedite cloud readiness in key business areas to help customers migrate to the cloud. Companies participating in the PTP will undergo a thorough readiness assessment, after which Tech Data will create a custom transformation program plan to help them build an AWS cloud practice to better serve their government, education and nonprofit customers.

“In delivering PTP, Tech Data’s partners will be able to leverage its insights from working with the world’s foremost cloud hyperscalers such as AWS,” said Stacy Nethercoat, senior vice president, Cloud Solutions, Americas, Tech Data. “PTP also offers Tech Data partners a tremendous opportunity to collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team of expert consultants working in conjunction with their Tech Data and AWS account teams to quickly gain a competitive advantage in the public sector marketplace through an AWS-enabled cloud business.”

Channel Impact^®
The offering joins the suite of partner enablement offerings from Tech Data including Cloud Practice Builder, a vendor-agnostic program that helps technology providers build profitable cloud businesses.