Last week Twinstate's Cybersecurity Analyst, Ashton Momot and Unified Defense Strategies Technical Manager, Alex Insley had the opportunity to visit Austin, Texas for the DattoCon 2018 conference. While the majority of the conference is focused on how Managed Service Providers (MSPs) operate, there was a lot of focus on products and technology that the average user may find interesting.
Machine Learning
This is the latest buzzword in the industry when discussing accelerating Anti-Virus capabilities. Traditional AV relies on signatures on any detected exploits, which unfortunately requires a “patient 0” to acquire a signature from. The latest trend is using models that ingests and categorizes massive amounts of data at any given time. These large amounts of data are processed, and eventually data is described as characteristically benign or malicious. Sophos, being a constant adapter of new technologies, is at the forefront of this. For further reading, please refer to this article for a technical explanation.
Managed Power
This year, Datto released a new product named “Managed Power” that was teased at last year’s conference in Denver, CO. This cloud managed device is essentially a power strip, designed to save an MSP a trip out to a customer site just to reboot a device. Now we’ll have the ability to power cycle equipment plugged in, as well as test connectivity to the device and monitor uptime. Check it out here!
GDPR
Another buzz word in the IT industry is compliance, and it’s only gaining traction and momentum. As of May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the EU, which focuses heavily on protecting the personal information of EU citizens. Organizations that store any information on EU citizens must go through steps to properly securing this data. While there is no “compliance” statement for an organization affected by GDPR, there is a lot of work that must be done between an MSP, legal counsel and the organization to prove necessary steps have been taken to protect this data, especially in the event of a data breach. If you have any questions, please reach out to us and we’ll be happy to assist. (compliance@twinstate.com)
Improvements to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
Datto announced at the conference that all Datto products will have a lifetime warranty, which includes previously sold devices. We think this speaks volumes to the quality of the product that Datto is coming out with, and it’s something we can stand behind to ensure important data is protected by the best.
Rapid Rollback is a new technology coming to the BCDR platform, which allows file system restores to occur after an incident without the necessity of reimaging the entire machine. It does this by comparing the existing files against the latest backup, then restores only the files that have changed. This is designed to limit downtime and hassle of having to reimage the affected device to get it back to full production mode quicker.
Datto also announced further improvements to their Backup Verification. This allows an MSP to further prove that the backups that we’re taking are 100% viable to restore from in case of disaster. We look for checks like system integrity, volume and VSS writer checks, and a bunch of other application and service verification steps performed by the Datto agent. All-in-all, there were multiple improvements done to the Datto platform that we are super excited for. Feel free to read about more changes here.
The IT industry certainly is constantly changing. We strive to constantly be on the forefront of these changes to know how it directly affects our customers. We also strive to offer products from companies that present at these conferences, that continue to adopt newer technologies and further improve their offerings based on new threats. It’s important that the products we sell are keeping up with the changing landscape, and continue to protect our customers in the most effective way possible.
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Originally published on 06/30/2018
Topic: Datto, Event Recap