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The nature of endpoints in IT terms has changed significantly in the last 10 to 15 years. Back in the early noughties, so-called thick applications were installed on users laptops (if they were lucky enough to own such a luxury item!) or on a desktop in the workplace. For cybersecurity teams, it was all about protecting what was installed on the system and the perimeter encompassing the clients LAN.

In the last 15 years, we have diversified from how that worked. The situation has almost gone back to the very early days of computing where mainframe or Meta-Frame (early Citrix Virtualisation) systems were used for hosting applications and data, and users addressed services through thin clients.

Today most applications and services are hosted in the cloud the latter-day mainframes or can be co-hosted, with low-overhead processing on the device and heavy-lifting done in a remote datacenter somewhere out there.

Todays internet connection speeds mean there is little difference in responsiveness between operating remote instances and local monolithic apps. Just as well, given that a decent proportion of the population finds itself suddenly working at home. That means protecting cloud services, cloud access, remote endpoints and data in transit become as important as safeguarding perimeters. Like Elvis, endpoints have left the (office) building, and while the central working-space show may be over for now, it just highlights the fluid nature of what cybersec teams have to protect.

To help us explore the changing picture of endpoints and cybersecurity practices, we spoke recently to Joseph Carson from Thycotic, a leader in privileged access management (PAM) solutions in Australia and New Zealand, and Asia. Joe is Chief Security Scientist and Advisory Chief Information Security Officer at the company and a cybersecurity expert with over 20 years of experience in the industry.

Thycotics expertise is in providing security based on risk risk posed by outside attackers on an organisation, but also the risks inherent in users having privilege-determined access to information. Its platform helps enterprises simplify what are often highly complex security toolsets.

With the company named as a leader in its field by top IT security analysts, the CISO at Thycotic has to know their craft. So, if anyone has the inside track on how organisations might reassess their security policies formulation with regards to newly defined endpoints, its Joe. We began by discussing the multiple accounts and services people access to get a days work done.

Endpoints are no longer just the devices, theyre hosted everywhere, he said. And that means that since internet access became vital for a lot of devices to function, so it means that the access, communication and traffic become important. [A user needs] a multitude of credentials and authentication to be able to access those applications. And thats where we start seeing a lot of things like Single Sign On, and privilege-based access security. [Those] really help manage those complexities of authentication and authorisation.

Joseph told us not to come at the cybersecurity issue from individual endpoints standpoint but rather to begin with a comprehensive and continuous risk assessment of the data and how it is accessed. After all, its what cybersecurity is designed to protect. Our job in cybersecurity is to help reduce the risk to the organisations business and help employees be successful.

First of all, before you get to any of the final decisions about implementations and strategies and controls, you have to understand what is [an organisations] risk? If I have a service, and that service isnt available for a day, whats the cost to the business? Can the employee do anything? And then the second part is getting the balance between productivity and security. You know, you should never sacrifice one or the other. So, its always finding that balance. In my mind, we need to get security to work so that means making security so its usable.

The second part of the cybersecurity puzzle has always been an issue for IT teams: a scale with extremes comprising byzantine protective systems making daily working tools unusable for most and a liberal approach that promotes freedom but leaves the stable door wide open. And, we suggested, isnt there also a big part for employee education in cybersecurity issues?

Joe told us that educating the users remains valuable, but that is exactly what cybersecurity teams have been trying to do for 20 or 30 years. And they shouldnt stop now! Thats a continuous thing, thats not something you should stop doing. We want better educated people to be able to visually identify risks and report them. Because when you have people in the front line that can actually report instances earlier, the better an organisation will be at reducing the risk.

Human defences are not the whole story at least not in a risk-based cybersecurity strategy like one that Joe continuously helps educate companies all around the world today

At the same time, we want to make sure that when they click on the link, [] the security controls in the background will work for them [and] bring important information to the foreground than they need or report it for additional checks in the background. The more we move security to the background, and where we make security work automatically and seamlessly, the better it is for the user.

Source: Thycotic

It is not just users in the enterprise who connect to networks, thereby, to one degree or another posing a threat to an organisations systems and data integrity. Today many thousands of devices attach through a network: the internet of things exists to a greater degree than many people imagine, and ensuring that machine security and identity is part of the risk assessment is a critical part of cybersecurity practice.

We discussed an example of an IoT network in which one device might drop off the radar then reappear a few hours later. In an intelligent, adaptive cybersecurity framework, such an event should raise a red flag until such a time as the reasons for the outage can be determined.

Aside from internet of things devices and cloud applications redefinition as endpoints that need cybersecurity consideration, 2020 and 2021 have writ large the BYOD issue. Or, as Joe terms it, bring your own disaster or soon to be bring your own office.

Many millions of words have been written (on this site alone) about the different ways in which organisations can help their users demarcate between work and personal applications/workloads on their tablets and phones. However, the Thycotic approach is a great deal more finely tuned.

For me to access my works email, it might be perfectly fine to authenticate with a username, password, and a multi factor authentication. Now, if I want to go and access, lets say, customer data, then the security control that I satisfied for my email is no longer just satisfactory. So, I cant just now move across and use the same security controls to access sensitive data. We refer to as leveling up, that you have to then level up or satisfy more security controls.

An example came up of how the Thycotic companys security controls worked (it takes its own medicine in that sense) on a granular level. Joe told us how, on a business trip outside his adopted homeland of Estonia, he got a notification from his team. Hed been attempting to access secure information from a different country behaviour the Thycotic automated systems had flagged as anomalous against the companys predefined policies.

Even though some of the technology used in situations like this is extremely complicated under the hood, Joe reaffirmed that for the end-user him, in this case simplicity was vital:

One of my mentors and bosses many years ago said that security should be like a light bulb or like electricity. You hit the switch, and you dont need to know the complexity in the background, it just works for you.

For further reading, we recommend this eBook, The Definitive Guide to Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM), plus theres a webinar to get involved in too. Both highly recommended.

Read the original here:
Thycotic commentator: your endpoints just followed Elvis out the building - Tech Wire Asia

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InMotion and SiteGround are two independent hosting companies providing a range of web hosting plans/packages to fit various needs.

InMotion is based in the U.S., established in 2001, and powers over 300,000 domains (as mentioned on their website) in more than 175 countries worldwide. On the other hand, SiteGround is a Bulgarian company operating since 2004 and hosts over 2 million domains worldwide.

This comparison article - InMotion hosting vs SiteGround hosting- will provide an in-depth understanding of the various types of hosting plans and features provided by the two companies to finally help you pick the best host for your new, growing, or established site, according to your business needs and budget.

Let's begin!

To give you a better understanding of which web host is ideal for your website, we compare the key features, server uptime, site response time, and the prices of the various forms of hosting plans offered by InMotion and SiteGround.

Unlike InMotion, SiteGround doesn't provide VPS and Dedicated Servers hosting plans, two of the most popular web hosting types used by advanced users.

The web host allows you to transfer up to three websites, databases, and cPanel accounts from an old host to the new InMotion Hosting account. If you wish to transfer more than three websites, the host will charge you an additional USD10 per item.

At SiteGround, you can manually transfer your existing WordPress sites to the new SiteGround account using the free WordPress migratory plugin. Simultaneously, you will have to pay an additional USD30/site for other types of websites for migrating it to SiteGround.

While InMotion offers a free domain credit (domain name registration or transfer) for the first year, SitGround provides no such distinction to its new customers. The latter charges USD15.95 - USD 17.95 per year for new domain name registration.

InMotion provides BoldGrid, a visual drag-and-drop website builder to create, manage, update and publish a website- all without coding skills. It features over 200 professional site layouts, professional image filters, pre-built page blocks, a full suite of WordPress plugins, a built-in SEO tool, a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and a hosting plan included in all plans.

BoldGrid is included free with all shared hosting plans.

SiteGround's hosting plans come with Weebly, the widely-used drag-and-drop website builder for creating a fully-functional website with limited or no coding skills required. The free version of the tool is included with all hosting plans.

InMotion Hosting comes with the popular cPanel control panel - regardless of plan or package type - for easy account management. The graphical cPanel interface has many various tools to manage hosting accounts and websites. These include- file/database management, email management, DNS customization, statistics tracker, and security tools, among others.

SiteGround uses an in-house website-specific tool called Site Tools. The tool allows easy, quick switching between multiple websites, each having a separate set of site management tools.

Site Tools / Image Credit: SiteGround

InMotion offers various security solutions to protect your websites from vicious cyberattacks. These include:

Shared Hosting

VPS Hosting

Dedicated Servers

On the other hand, SiteGround Hosting plans come with a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate as well as advanced custom security solutions, including:

Depending on the plan you sign up with, InMotion offers a full money-back guarantee on its various web hosting plans. For instance, the company provides a 90-day money-back guarantee with all its annual Shared, VPS hosting plans, while a 30-day guarantee covers monthly plans. InMotion's dedicated servers and all monthly Reseller hosting plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

At SiteGround, you get a 30-day money-back guarantee with the shared hosting plans, while a 14-day guarantee covers the Cloud hosting plans.

InMotion offers 24/7/365 support via:

SiteGround provides support via:

Uptime, the amount of time a server has been up and running, is an essential website performance indicator along with speed and response time. InMotion utilizes multiple data centers, smart routing technology, and SSD drives to keep the servers up and running. The company provides a 99.99% network uptime on its dedicated hosting plans.

Powered by Google Cloud, SiteGround offers an annual network uptime of 99.9%. For uptime ranging between 99.9% - 99.00%, the company promises one month of free hosting and an additional free month for every 1% of uptime lost below 99.00%.

Furthermore, we have reviewed the average uptime offered by InMotion and SiteGround in a test site over the last six month period (via).

Winner: SiteGround (99.98% uptime)

Note: It is worth mentioning that uptime depends on various factors, including the type of server - shared, VPS, dedicated - and hardware reliability, to name a few.

InMotion's premium bandwidth providers and smart routing technology help the company provide performance gains. Besides, the company leverages:

Apart from leveraging the Google Cloud Platform's superfast network and SSD persistent storage, SiteGround has deployed several site speed-boosting technologies. These include:

Besides, this six-month overview - from Sept 2020-Feb 2021 - shows the average response time offered by a test site hosted on InMotion and SiteGround (via):

Winner: InMotion

Shared hosting is the easiest and the most affordable form of web hosting for small businesses and individuals. Both InMotion and SiteGround provide shared web hosting with the following features:

At InMotion, shared hosting is offered in three separate packages - Launch, Power, and Pro - with all plans including hosting for multiple sites, free domain name registration/ transfer, unlimited bandwidth, top-tier security, easy access to Google apps, one-Click Installs of 400+ applications, free website builder, security suite, marketing tools including USD150 advertising credits and more features.

The Launch shared hosting plan allows for hosting two websites and offers 50GB SSD storage, 3x performance and speed, 10 email addresses, and 3 MySQL& PostgreSQL Databases. It is ideal for beginners.

The Power shared hosting plan includes hosting for 50 websites, 100GB SSD storage, 4x performance and speed, 50 email addresses, 50 MySQL& PostgreSQL Databases, and more features. It is suitable for heavy traffic websites.

The top-tier Pro plan allows for hosting 100 websites. It provides 200GB SSD storage, 6x performance and speed, unlimited email address, and Pro level support that gives you a 99.99 uptime guarantee on the service level agreement (SLA). It is the best option for those looking for maximum performance and speed.

SiteGround Shared Hosting comes in three levels:

The StartUp plan allows for hosting only one website and provides 10GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited databases, free Weebly site builder, free CDN and email, spam protection, and automated daily backups, among other features

The GrowBig plan allows for hosting unlimited websites, 20GB SSD storage, ultrafast PHP, on-demand backup copies, staging, and collaboration tools.

The GoGeek shared hosting plan all the features of the StartUp and GrowBig plans and offers 40GB SSD storage, Git, white-label access, and Priority support.

The table below compares the basic and the top-tier shared hosting plans of InMotion and SiteGround:

Winner: InMotion

InMotion provides managed WordPress hosting with free site transfer tools, SSD storage, free CDN, automatic backups, automatic security patches and more features. It is offered in four different packages:

All of the InMotion WordPress Hosting plans include:

Further, InMotion also provides WordPress Hosting on a Virtual Private Server. Starting at USD38.99/month for a 12-month term, WP-VPS hosting plans are offered in three levels:

SiteGround is one of the only three WP hosting providers recommended by WordPress.org. Its managed WordPress Hosting plans include the same features as the shared hosting plans in addition to some WordPress-specific tools and features like SG-Git, SG Optimizer plugin, one-click staging tool, to name a few.

=> For an in-depth review of SiteGround's WordPress hosting, read our previous article - SiteGround reviews .

Now, we are comparing the basic and the top-tier WordPress hosting plans from InMotion and SiteGround:

Winner: SiteGround

Here are the introductory prices (prices for the initial term) of various hosting packages offered by InMotion and SiteGround.

In terms of introductory pricing, both companies are on an equal footing. However, if we look at the renewal prices - the price after the initial term expires- InMotion is cheaper than SiteGround. For instance, InMotion's shared hosting basic plan (12 months) renews for USD11.99/mo, whereas SiteGround's basic shared hosting plan renews for USD14.99/mo.

Winner: InMotion

After comparing InMotion and SiteGround hosting plans, features, uptime, and other key metrics, we can say that it is a tough fight between the two hosting providers. While SiteGround is ahead in offering better uptime and WordPress hosting.

InMotion gains an edge over SiteGround in providing a wide range of hosting services, site response time, domain credit, cheaper renewal rates, and 90-days money-back guarantee.

Wondering which one of these two hosts is best for your website? Take a look at the table below that summarizes the comparison.

Depending on your needs, both InMotion and SiteGround can be an ideal choice for your website.

See the article here:
InMotion vs SiteGround: Which web host is the best? - Devdiscourse

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