Cloud Payroll Software Benefits | Zoho Payroll

Until recently, many small businesses have been reluctant to adopt new software because of the upfront cost involved in setting it up. Only enterprise-level players could really imagine being able to implement software to optimize their operations. However, disruptions in cloud-technology have made business software easily affordable for businesses of all sizes.

The global cloud-based payroll software market is expected to be worth US $ 17.39 billion by 2027, and the benefits of cloud-based software are unparalleled in terms of operational efficiency and cost savings. Businesses are able to improve their efficiency by deploying new software with minimum risk and reduced internal staffing requirements. It also allows them to pair greater reliability, security, and privacy with higher productivity, reduced cost, and quicker return on the minimal investment incurred.

In this article, we will look at the benefits of cloud-based software and what it brings to the table for optimizing your payroll operations.

Cloud payroll software

Operational advantages

Saving upfront costs

Embracing a cloud-based payroll system frees businesses from the complexities and expense of purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading legacy on-premises systems. From the perspective of your head of finance, there is no capital expenditure and huge savings in cost, regardless of the size of your business.

 Cloud systems are also easier for your IT department. Unlike legacy on-premises systems that require significant in-house work to update every few years, cloud payroll systems are updated by their vendors as often as needed, often several times a year, with virtually no implementation work from your internal IT department.

That’s in addition to the massive cost savings associated with not having to invest in servers and other hardware to run on-premises systems, or the people needed to maintain them.

Empowering businesses to be faster and more efficient

When one of our prospective clients was recently asked why he wanted to switch to a cloud-based payroll system, he replied, “We absolutely have no issues with the way our current system is calculating payroll, but it is aging badly. The system is not up to the needs of today’s fast-paced mobile, interconnected, and data-dependent world. Additionally, the customisation of the system once used to be a strong point now proves to be a double-edged sword, as making upgrades are incredibly time-consuming, resource-intensive, costly, and risky “

This is typical of the reasons that businesses choose to make the switch—even a high-quality legacy system often ages poorly and takes up significant resources to complete routine payroll tasks compared to a cloud system. Also, cloud payroll software allows business owners to access their payroll information from wherever they are, allowing payroll professionals to respond faster to employee requests, and to get their own work done faster.

Core payroll advantages

Employee data is centralized

Payroll is more than just about calculating your employees’ paychecks. If you don’t organize all your employee records in a central place right from the employees’ first day at work, it can affect the paychecks’ accuracy. For example, a wrongly entered or misremembered Date of Joining could mean an employee losing out on a whole day’s wage. For the employer, that is a compliance nightmare.

With cloud payroll software, you can track and manage the information related to all your employees’ life cycle events, such as onboarding, benefits, salary revisions, leaves, and investment declarations, using one centralized source of data. You can also manage all employee communications from a centralized location.

Compliance is simplified

Unlike legacy software, the cloud payroll system allows you to adapt to compliance changes on the fly. Regulatory changes, new budget announcements, revised deduction percentages, and other changes can now be handled faster. With one update to the central server, you ensure that your business stays compliant with all the statutory compliance laws for PF, ESI, PT, LWF, IT, and other updates made by the Government.

Reduced workload for payroll staff

Maintaining employee records, collecting proofs, and validating submitted proofs takes up a major chunk of every HR’s time month by month. Additionally, responding to clarifying questions with back-and-forth emails is extremely time-consuming. Cloud payroll software with employee self-service portals allows you to delegate some of your routine work back to your employees. Employees can submit their proofs themselves, while employers can validate them and approve or reject the submitted proofs online. If something is missing, you can send real-time messages to request supporting documents from your employees, avoiding the hassle of back-and-forth emails.

Complex business processes unified by technology

It is well known that the HR, payroll, and finance teams of any organization have to come together to implement payroll successfully each month. Your employees’ personal information, tax-related data, leave and attendance data, bonuses and other information has to flow into your payroll system automatically for a flawless payroll. Business departments used to work in silos to bring all this information together, but with cloud technology, integrating complex business processes is a lot easier. A tightly integrated HR, payroll, and accounting system make real collaboration possible.

Single sign-on enables your staff to switch between multiple systems without the need to remember multiple passwords. Secure access controls improve cross-department collaboration without sacrificing security or usability. The information flows between departments in real-time, effortlessly.

Real-time data, anywhere in the world

In a recent survey of senior finance executives by CFO Research, nearly 41 percent of respondents said their management teams cannot access the data they need when they need it. Nearly two-thirds said their information systems are duplicative and complex, and that the financial and performance information used for decision-making is not as useful as it should be.

The biggest reason for these problems is that most businesses are using redundant systems with technology that’s many years out of date.

Cloud payroll software delivers information, insights, and consolidated payroll metrics in real-time, without the need for separate business intelligence systems, separate data warehouses. From getting a view on consolidated payroll expenses to overall tax-liabilities, the information is available in a single click.

The way forward

Cloud payroll systems offer numerous advantages over traditional systems like spreadsheets or on-premises payroll software. With the future of getting back to work uncertain, many companies would benefit from considering remote work as an option for their employees, including remote payroll management.

With Zoho Payroll business owners can manage their payroll operations end-to-end. The in-house accounting and HRMS systems allow them to eliminate multiple vendors for these functions. Self-service portals in both web and mobile app allows the payroll staff to digitize time-consuming paperwork. Zoho Payroll also has the power to manage a distributed workforce with ease, allowing your staff to continue your payroll operations from wherever they are.

 

Net Universe offers all Zoho subscritpions and consultant services with worldwide Delivery Services.
Send us an email to [email protected] for more information or visit https://www.netuniversecorp.com/zoho.

What is cloud payroll? | Benefits of cloud payroll software

Until recently, many small businesses have been reluctant to adopt new software because of the upfront cost involved in setting it up. Only enterprise-level players could really imagine being able to implement software to optimize their operations. However, disruptions in cloud-technology have made business software easily affordable for businesses of all sizes.

The global cloud-based payroll software market is expected to be worth US $ 17.39 billion by 2027, and the benefits of cloud-based software are unparalleled in terms of operational efficiency and cost savings. Businesses are able to improve their efficiency by deploying new software with minimum risk and reduced internal staffing requirements. It also allows them to pair greater reliability, security, and privacy with higher productivity, reduced cost, and quicker return on the minimal investment incurred.

In this article, we will look at what cloud payroll is, and the benefits of cloud-based software, and what it brings to the table for optimizing your payroll operations.

Cloud payroll software - Zoho Payroll

What is cloud payroll software?

A payroll management system where you can access, operate and control everything about your payroll from onboarding employees to ensuring compliance to handling exit processes over a remote system – the cloud – with nothing but a computer connected to the internet.

A cloud-based payroll system is a massive support for employers who are still operating remotely, including the payroll department. It allows employees to work from any location, and have access to the same information that they’d have access to from their office. All this, while ensuring safe payroll transactions and data maintenance with fine grained security protocols, preventing data breach or unauthorized access.

Benefits of cloud-based payroll software

Operational advantages

Saving upfront costs

Embracing a cloud-based payroll software frees businesses from the complexities and expense of purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading legacy on-premises systems. From the perspective of your head of finance, there is no capital expenditure and huge savings in cost, regardless of the size of your business.

 Cloud systems are also easier for your IT department. Unlike legacy on-premises systems that require significant in-house work to update every few years, cloud payroll systems are updated by their vendors as often as needed, often several times a year, with virtually no implementation work from your internal IT department.

That’s in addition to the massive cost savings associated with not having to invest in servers and other hardware to run on-premises systems, or the people needed to maintain them.

Empowering businesses to be faster and more efficient

When one of our prospective clients was recently asked why he wanted to switch to a cloud-based payroll system, he replied, “We absolutely have no issues with the way our current system is calculating payroll, but it is aging badly. The system is not up to the needs of today’s fast-paced mobile, interconnected, and data-dependent world. Additionally, the customisation of the system once used to be a strong point now proves to be a double-edged sword, as making upgrades are incredibly time-consuming, resource-intensive, costly, and risky “

This is typical of the reasons that businesses choose to make the switch—even a high-quality legacy system often ages poorly and takes up significant resources to complete routine payroll tasks compared to a cloud system. Also, cloud payroll software allows business owners to access their payroll information from wherever they are, allowing payroll professionals to respond faster to employee requests, and to get their own work done faster.

Core payroll advantages

Employee data is centralized

Payroll is more than just about calculating your employees’ paychecks. If you don’t organize all your employee records in a central place right from the employees’ first day at work, it can affect the paychecks’ accuracy. For example, a wrongly entered or misremembered Date of Joining could mean an employee losing out on a whole day’s wage. For the employer, that is a compliance nightmare.

With cloud payroll software, you can track and manage the information related to all your employees’ life cycle events, such as onboarding, benefits, salary revisions, leaves, and investment declarations, using one centralized source of data. You can also manage all employee communications from a centralized location.

Compliance is simplified

Unlike legacy software, the cloud-based payroll software allows you to adapt to compliance changes on the fly. In India, there are various regulatory laws such as new budget announcements, revised deduction percentages, and other changes that can now be handled faster. With one update to the central server, you ensure that your business stays compliant with all the statutory compliance laws for PF, ESI, PT, LWF, IT, and other updates made by the Government.

Reduced workload for payroll staff

Maintaining employee records, collecting proofs, and validating submitted proofs takes up a major chunk of every HR’s time month by month. Additionally, responding to clarifying questions with back-and-forth emails is extremely time-consuming. Cloud-based payroll software with employee self-service portals allows you to delegate some of your routine work back to your employees. Employees can submit their proofs themselves, while employers can validate them and approve or reject the submitted proofs online. If something is missing, you can send real-time messages to request supporting documents from your employees, avoiding the hassle of back-and-forth emails.

Complex business processes unified by technology

It is well known that the HR, payroll, and finance teams of any organization have to come together to implement payroll successfully each month. Your employees’ personal information, tax-related data, leave and attendance data, bonuses and other information has to flow into your payroll system automatically for a flawless payroll. Business departments used to work in silos to bring all this information together, but with cloud technology, integrating complex business processes is a lot easier. A tightly integrated HR, payroll, and accounting system make real collaboration possible.

Single sign-on enables your staff to switch between multiple systems without the need to remember multiple passwords. Secure access controls improve cross-department collaboration without sacrificing security or usability. The information flows between departments in real-time, effortlessly.

Real-time data, anywhere in the world

In a recent survey of senior finance executives by CFO Research, nearly 41 percent of respondents said their management teams cannot access the data they need when they need it. Nearly two-thirds said their information systems are duplicative and complex, and that the financial and performance information used for decision-making is not as useful as it should be.

The biggest reason for these problems is that most businesses are using redundant systems with technology that’s many years out of date.

Cloud payroll software delivers information, insights, and consolidated payroll metrics in real-time, without the need for separate business intelligence systems, separate data warehouses. From getting a view on consolidated payroll expenses to overall tax-liabilities, the information is available in a single click.

The way forward

Cloud payroll systems offer numerous advantages over traditional systems like spreadsheets or on-premises payroll software. With the future of getting back to work uncertain, many companies would benefit from considering remote work as an option for their employees, including remote payroll management.

With Zoho Payroll business owners can manage their payroll operations end-to-end. The in-house accounting and HRMS systems allow them to eliminate multiple vendors for these functions. Self-service portals in both web and mobile app allows the payroll staff to digitize time-consuming paperwork. Zoho Payroll also has the power to manage a distributed workforce with ease, allowing your staff to continue your payroll operations from wherever they are.

 

Net Universe offers all Zoho subscritpions and consultant services with worldwide Delivery Services.
Send us an email to [email protected] for more information or visit https://www.netuniversecorp.com/zoho.

See apps installed on managed Windows 10 devices

Quick launch summary 

You can now view a list of all apps installed on Windows 10 devices that you manage with Windows device management. The list includes when the app was first installed, the current version, and the publisher. You can use this information to identify devices that have malicious or untrusted apps on them. 

See apps installed on managed Windows 10 devices 

Getting started 

Rollout pace 

Availability 

  • Available to G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Enterprise for Education, and Cloud Identity Premium customers 
  • Not available to G Suite Basic, G Suite Business, G Suite for Education, G Suite for Nonprofits, G Suite Essentials, and Cloud Identity Free customers 

Resources 


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Migrate users and data between G Suite environments more easily

G Suite Migrate, currently available in beta, helps admins assess, plan, and migrate large amounts of content directly into G Suite. It already supports Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive, file shares, and Box migrations. With this launch, you can now also migrate between G Suite environments. Specifically, you can: 

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Email-delivered MoDi RAT attack pastes PowerShell commands – Sophos News

SophosLabs researchers Fraser Howard and Andrew O’Donnell stumbled upon an unusual reflective loader attack method last month while hunting through threat telemetry. The attack chain started with a malicious email message that contained some hostile VB scripting code, and concluded by delivering a commodity remote access Trojan named MoDi RAT.

These kinds of detections often lead to interesting, divergent attacks, which is what the detection teams are looking for. Diving down the rabbit hole, Howard and O’Donnell discovered a few intriguing twists to the convoluted attack, which included a Scheduled Task that started a Visual Basic Script file that, in turn, launches PowerShell and then literally pasted the text of the commands into the PowerShell window, rather than passing the command string as a parameter.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here is Howard’s root cause analysis (RCA) of the attack chain.

AMSI vs. MoDi RAT

The attack analysis pivoted on some of the data collected from Sophos endpoint products using Microsoft’s Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI). The root cause of the attack triggered our telemetry: a malicious script, delivered (most likely) via spam. In the example below, the user’s browser (Edge, highlighted in red below) started the attack chain, which you can see in this snippet of the threat case.

The attack begins when a recipient of the malspam opens the message attachment. The Visual Basic Script in the message attachment connects to a remote site, which is the entry point into a series of HTTP 302 redirects that eventually lead to a .Zip archive, hosted in OneDrive cloud storage, that contains an encoded VBS (VBE) file. 

With the VBE file in hand, we set about reproducing the entire attack to get a complete picture, right through to the payload.

The initial VBScript writes out a second VBS file to the filesystem, and inserts three new entries into the Windows Registry that contain binary data, written out as 8-digit binary numbers. It then launches a system utility to create a new Scheduled Task that, at a predetermined time in the future, launches the VBS script.

When the Scheduled Task runs, it uses wscript.exe to launch the VBS. The VBS code launches PowerShell and then runs this code, which takes data from the VBS and inserts it into the system’s clipboard, where it can then programmatically “paste” the commands into the PowerShell window using the VBS SendKeys command.

This neat little trick to deliver the powershell commands seems designed to evade detection by keeping the commands they execute under the radar, rather than attracting attention by spawning an instance of PowerShell with some interesting command-line parameters that might trigger all sorts of security product alerts. From this point on, the attack is fileless.

In the next step, PowerShell extracts a .NET decoder executable from one of the Registry blobs (labeled Entreur in the Registry) that the VBE had created earlier, and reflectively loads it by injecting it into a system process.

The decoder executable, in turn, extracts the .NET injector and payload blobs (labeled in the Registry as inj and Myfile, respectively) from the Registry. Then the injector loads the payload (injecting into the host application, msbuild.exe).

Notably, the initial Zip payload name (“Timbres-electroniques”) and several other strings, including the Entreur Registry key were comprised of words from the French language. Some of the targets of these attacks were French firms.

The diagram below summarizes all this and illustrates the key components of the attack chain.

The three .NET executable layers (decoder, injector, and payload) do not touch the disk, but we proactively blocked the attack based on our recognition of the technique the attackers employ to deliver the payload filelessly.

Despite already proactively blocking this attack, as a result of our further investigation we were able to enhance existing detections to provide additional resilience against similar attacks we might see in the future.

Why you should upgrade from older Windows

Microsoft’s AMSI framework that helps us intercept and neutralize these kinds of attacks is only available on certain recent flavors of Windows (Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019). If there’s one single reason why users of older versions of Windows should upgrade, it’s this: AMSI protection is crucial to helping us defend against many of today’s attacks, particularly those that use fileless techniques.

This attack typifies how most of the fileless attacks that we see work. AMSI provides the capability for Sophos to proactively protect customers against a range of similar attacks, and the telemetry we’re able to get lets us dive into these rabbit holes so we can identify and enhance our protections more effectively.

Sophos endpoint products will detect the components of this attack as AMSI/Reflect-D, Troj/VBSInj-D, and AMSI/ModiRat-A.

Indicators of compromise

IoCs relating to this investigation have been posted to the SophosLabs Github.

Net Universe offers all Sophos Devices and subscritpions also consultant services with worldwide Delivery Services.
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How an LMS supports blended learning courses

How an LMS facilitates blended Learning


Organizing blended learning courses, which combines online and classroom training, is a great way to motivate your employees to participate in training programs. This learner-centric training technique makes learning more efficient because topics that are more complex can be distinguished from those that are simpler, and the associated coursed can be administered in the right way. However, the success of blended learning programs is largely dependent on how they are delivered to your employees. Having a Learning Management System (LMS) can help you create and manage blended learning courses. Here’s how an LMS facilitates blended learning courses:

  • Helps employees access all essential learning materials through their laptops, smartphones, or tablets
  • Allows course instructors to organize virtual learning sessions, connecting learners from any part of the world instantly
  • Enables learners to collaborate with their peers and course instructors online
  • Supports targeted learning as multiple courses specific to different departments, roles, and designations can be created in a single place
  • Provides insightful reports with learning analytics that are necessary to improve courses and make them more learner-centric

Read more about how an LMS supports blended learning courses in our HR Knowledge Hive.

Net Universe offers all Zoho subscritpions and consultant services with worldwide Delivery Services.
Send us an email to [email protected] for more information or visit https://www.netuniversecorp.com/zoho.

Announcing Zoho Mail as IMAP Client: One place for all your email accounts

With the prevalence of email today, many of us are used to owning multiple email accounts—often hosted across different providers—for business and personal use. While we may still enjoy the specific benefits each of these providers offer, having to juggle the different accounts and hop from one email platform to another can be time-consuming. If you use Zoho Mail for your business accounts, if you’re looking for a richly featured platform to consolidate your accounts, or if Zoho is simply your favorite interface, then we have great news: Zoho Mail introduces IMAP client to help you configure, sync, and manage your other email accounts via IMAP.

Zoho Mail as IMAP Client

Why IMAP? Choosing IMAP to transfer emails is advantageous because the communication is two-way synchronized between the email server and the email client. This means that no matter what device or client you use for email, and no matter how often you switch from one to the other, your folders and emails are perfectly synced across all of them.

How to set up IMAP syncing through Zoho Mail

As long as your email provider supports IMAP, the set-up process is simple and you will be ready to access your external accounts inside Zoho Mail in three easy steps—add, authenticate, and sync. First, select your email provider and add the email address of the account you want to access from Zoho Mail. Here’s how the workflow varies based on whether you are adding accounts authenticated with a password or through OAuth.

Authentication using OAuth

If your email account is either Outlook or Office 365, your configuration is authenticated via OAuth. After logging in successfully, enable read and write permissions for Zoho to add your account and begin the sync. You can further update other details like the Account name, Reply To address, and more, and each update will once again be verified by OAuth to ensure perfect security.

Authentication using a password

For accounts that need to be authenticated with a password, start by filling out the incoming and outgoing server details. This information will be easily available either in your email provider’s settings page or in the help documents. Even better, for popular services like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, MSN, or another Zoho account, these details are pre-filled, so you’ll only need to specify your password and the from date for the sync to begin. For detailed instructions, head over to our help page.

Note: If you have a Gmail account or any other service with TFA enabled, it is mandatory for you to create and use an app-specific password to begin the sync.

Once you’ve set up your account sync with IMAP, you can easily toggle between your primary Zoho account and any other Zoho and external accounts in the folder pane on the left. You can now enjoy reading all your emails in your Zoho Mail inbox and manage distinct settings for each account from a single place. Don’t forget to give us your feedback too! 🙂


Pearlyn Anugraha


Pearlyn is a part of the marketing team at Zoho Mail and Workplace. Bitten by the literature bug. Occasionally pens poems. Blogger. Singer. Night owl. Sky gazer.

Net Universe offers all Zoho subscritpions and consultant services with worldwide Delivery Services.
Send us an email to [email protected] for more information or visit https://www.netuniversecorp.com/zoho.

Easily add and manage citations in Google Docs

Quick launch summary 

We’re launching a new feature to help you add, manage, and format academic citations in Google Docs. This will make writing academic papers easier since you won’t have to use add-ons, or copy citations from other tools. 

Using this feature, you can easily insert in-text citations and create a bibliography in the MLA, APA, or Chicago (author-date) styles. Sources types supported include books, book sections, websites, journal articles and newspaper articles. 

Citations tool in Google Docs 

Getting started 

Rollout pace 

Availability 

  • Available to all G Suite customers 

Resources 


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ProTips: 5 ways to ace employee engagement and motivation

This is a guest post by Xoxoday Plum.

Employees feel valued when their work is recognized and appreciated, leading to increased engagement and morale. Not only that, appreciation also helps employees focus on their day-to-day activities and motivates them to keep performing better.

That’s why incentives, rewards, and recognition hold a central place in the people management strategies of any organization. They can influence employee recruitment and retention and also have a huge impact on improving employee performance. Your customers will receive better experiences as well because your employees will be better engaged and ready to deliver their best work.

Here are five tips for rewards and recognition that will help you build a more engaged and motivated workforce.

ProTip 1: Explore the power of instant gratification

Incentive delayed is incentive denied. Employees find value in being acknowledged for their achievements sooner rather than later. If the appreciation is delayed, it can make your employees resentful. Taking advantage of instant gratification is not only a huge morale boost to the achiever—it also motivates others in the team to push harder to reach their goals sooner.

Xoxoday Plum, a cloud-based rewards and recognition solution, partners with several third-party services to provide a vast collection of reward experiences, digital gift cards, benefits, and more. Xoxoday Plum integrates with Zoho People, so you can incentivize your employees with scalable and fast rewards and recognition strategy based on employee performance.

ProTip 2: Provide employees with options and choices

Employees of today expect more thought to go into the rewards, incentives, and benefits they receive. Giving out a standard gift as a reward, limiting rewards to a narrow set of options, or limiting based on location can be extremely demotivating to employees.

With the Xoxoday Plum – Zoho People integration, you can give your employees access to a catalog of 5000+ experiences, 3000+ gift vouchers, and 12000+ perks. Employees are guaranteed to find something that motivates them to keep performing better.

ProTip 3: Automate your rewards and benefits program

Procuring rewards and managing the inventory is only half the challenge. The other half is making sure the process is fair and unbiased. Eliminate all manual processes and completely automate the rewards and benefits program in your organization using the Xoxoday Plum – Zoho People integration.

ProTip 4: Reward and recognize from anywhere

With the internet, mobile devices, smart workspaces, and more, employees now expect everything to be accessible through a variety of mediums. The Xoxoday Plum integration with Zoho People makes rewarding simple and accessible from any computer, tablet, or smartphone, anywhere across the globe. Managers can assign rewards and give recognition from any location while employees can access their incentive statuses, check balance information, and redeem points where and when they want and from the device of their choice.

ProTip 5: Make work fun for your employees‍

Stringent work cultures that focus only on clocking a fixed number of hours, always doing exactly what you did yesterday without any variation, can be detrimental to the morale of the organization. It’s essential to create opportunities from time to time where employees can relax, interact with peers more casually, and have fun at work. Be it Pizza Fridays or team dinners, quarterly outings or annual vacations, the Xoxoday Plum integration with Zoho People can help you build a culture of fun at your workplace.

Try Xoxoday Plum for Zoho People  

Work smarter by adding new capabilities to Zoho People with business solutions from Zoho Marketplace.

Explore Zoho Marketplace

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School District Secures Distance Learning for 18,000+ Students With FortiEDR

Customer Perspectives

As school districts across the United States booted up for distance learning, endpoint security became a top priority. Many educational organizations found themselves a target of cybercriminals exploiting the recent pandemic through social engineering attacks—especially now that students and staff have access to the district’s network from their own devices, in their own homes. 

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of easily exploited endpoint devices connected to networks was growing rapidly. This increased even moreso with the shift to remote work and learning. This issue is exacerbated by the growing sophistication of cyber threats and the pandemic-related attacks launched by cybercriminals leveraging fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) in social engineering attacks.

One U.S. school district found itself procuring 20,000 more laptops to enable its 18,000 students and 2,200 staff members to learn and work from home. With growing concerns around ransomware and phishing—particularly spearphishing—and an incumbent solution that was not meeting their expectations, the school district began looking for a new vendor. An ideal solution would provide remote web filtering, endpoint protection, detection, response and remote remediation. 

As an existing Fortinet customer, this district already had a number of solutions across the Fortinet Security Fabric in place, including FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, FortiSandbox, FortiAuthenticator, and FortiClient. Because of this, the district had already seen how Fortinet’s broad, integrated, and automated product portfolio enabled increased visibility, centralized management, and seamless protection across the entire digital attack surface—including remote locations. Both their knowledge of the extensive Fortinet portfolio and the existing trusted partnership between the two led the school district to begin a proof of concept (PoC) of Fortinet’s Endpoint Detection and Response solution, FortiEDR.

FortiEDR delivers real-time, automated threat protection, detection, and response for endpoints—both pre- and post-infection. The key capabilities of FortiEDR include discovery and risk mitigation, next-generation antivirus (NGAV), behavior-based detection, real-time blocking, automated incident response, forensic investigation, threat hunting, and virtual patching capabilities. FortiEDR delivers all of this in a form factor with a lightweight footprint that is easy to deploy, even on devices with limited system resources. And as part of the Security Fabric, FortiEDR could seamlessly integrate with the existing solutions the school district had in place, ensuring centralized management and complete visibility and control across their digital attack surface.

After seeing a variety of ransomware samples being tested and automatically dealt with in real-time during the PoC, this school district determined that FortiEDR met, and even exceeded each of their expectations and was exactly what they were looking for to secure remote access and improve endpoint security among students and staff. 

By adopting FortiEDR, this school district saw the following benefits: 

  • Secure remote access and remote web filtering: FortiEDR enables students and staff alike to gain access to the school district’s resources without compromising the security of the network by ensuring consistent remote web filtering. 
  • Enhanced endpoint visibility and resilience: FortiEDR not only gives the school district complete visibility over all endpoint devices connected to the network and ensures that each of those devices are resilient against potential threats. 
  • Improved threat protection: With growing concern around ransomware and targeted spearphishing emails, this school district was relieved to adopt an endpoint security solution that would mitigate those risks and protect students and staff as they work remotely. 

With FortiEDR, this school district was well-equipped to secure endpoints during distance learning and well into the future.  

Learn more about how FortiEDR has the unique ability to defuse and disarm a threat in real-time, pre- and post-infection.

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