Peer to Peer Magazine

50 like Microsoft Office 365, Exchange Online, and Intune make it easy for firms to protect their resources based on identity and to understand who is being targeted. A user's identity may spread to many devices without risk as long as the firm is managing it. Windows 10 in particular has leveraged the cloud, analytics, and biometrics to bring excellent new security enhancements with every successive version. The operating system has not only built-in encryption but also filtering. User behavior analytics and conditional access allow administrators to spot and react to atypical behavior or access from suspicious locations. The "Modern Desktop" approach (Microsoft's coinage) draws on the cloud to produce the Intelligence Security Graph for administrators, which analyzes user behavior for easy detection of anomalies. The cloud has modernized mobile device management (MDM), allowing administrators to have a much lighter touch today than they did several years ago. As mentioned above, identity-based single-sign on has eased IT's worries about the dispersion of data among many devices. Further, cloud MDM solutions like Intune and VMware AirWatch make it easier than ever to add light management to a variety of devices, be they laptops or phones, PC or Mac. Cloud infrastructure also simplifies the exit strate for IT administrators — one click and all the departing user's devices are wiped. Biometrics Hardware has also made great strides toward intuitive and secure use. Manufacturers are building faster, lighter laptops with better batteries, and many of these are specifically geared towards attorneys and their style of work. New laptops are also designed for biometric sign-in, allowing attorneys to sign in both securely and easily with fingerprint or facial scanning. Windows 10's biometrics all but eliminate the risk of phishing. Hackers, whether sponsored by governments or mafias, are not stealing physical laptops but passwords from thousands of miles away. Biometric security is actually (secretly) a form of two-factor authentication — one that makes the process of signing on easier rather than more complicated. Laptops and Always-On VPN Laptops have undergone arguably the most dramatic evolution of all mobile devices in the legal industry and offer the most compelling new freedoms. They have become, firstly, easier than ever to work. An always-on VPN makes it simple to connect to the firm's network from anywhere. Before Microsoft Always On VPN and DirectAccess, a laptop could be in several states of connectedness. It might not be connected at all and need troubleshooting by IT or it might be connected to the internet but not to VPN, requiring an attorney to go through a somewhat cumbersome VPN software interface. Always-on VPN ensures that the laptop is always in the ideal third state of secure connectivity as long as the user has internet access, eliminating ambiguous scenarios that can pose challenges for those who aren't IT-savvy. "Casual road warriors," those who travel as an exception, stand the most to gain from an always-on VPN. They can now be securely connected while on the road, without having to think about it. Considering all these advancements, it is strange how many attorneys still do not have laptops— Chris Owens Chris Owens is the Chief Technology Officer at Kraft Kennedy. With over 20 years of consulting and technology management experience, Chris specializes in helping law firms with desktop design and management, server and storage consolidation and collocation, DR/BC, email messaging design and migration, document management, and hybrid/thin-client architecture. Windows 10 in particular has leveraged the cloud, analytics, and biometrics to bring excellent new security enhancements with every successive version.

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