Cyberattacks never end—you’ve likely heard of at least one major data breach in the past year—and for businesses, they’re a real problem. What most people don’t hear about, but cybersecurity professionals know intimately, is that businesses are fending off cyberattacks on various fronts on a daily basis. How successful they are depends on a number of factors, from their data storage policies all the way down to the hardware their employees use.
Ransomware specifically continues to be the biggest threat to large and medium businesses, with a 2022 report stating that global ransomware damages are estimated to exceed $30 billion this year. Another 2022 report, which included responses from C-suite and technical professionals at organizations of varying sizes and industries, said that 60 percent of the respondents saw malware and ransomware as an extreme threat to their business—with nearly all the respondents saying they could be targets of these attacks in the next 12 months.
Some of the biggest challenges facing business security professionals are due to changes in how we work, mostly brought on by the pandemic—specifically, the shift to a work-from-home culture, employees opting to use their personal devices for work purposes, and the ever-expanding interconnectivity of devices.
Balancing the need for security with ensuring employees are set up for optimal performance isn’t always easy. Selecting Windows PCs that can tackle security threats while increasing functional performance—such as desktops and laptops built on Intel vPro® — makes it easier for businesses to handle.
Intel is uniquely positioned to give businesses the tools they need to tackle cybersecurity threats, thanks to its longstanding history of chip-making innovation and optimizing software and operating systems to hardware — and its broad ecosystem of relationships that are dedicated to advancing security, which has always been important to Intel. Intel vPro was conceived 16 years ago to deliver robust security protections, business-class performance, remote manageability, and PC fleet stability — all in a validated set that consists of CPU, firmware, and other key hardware components to form a single, integrated business computing platform within the PC. Over the years, Intel has regularly upgraded the platform by introducing new capabilities to meet business needs, including tackling the rise in cybersecurity threats.
To do this, the Intel vPro platform takes a multi-layered approach to security right out of the box and is continually being upgraded, with the Intel vPro with 13th gen Intel® Core™ processors having the latest in cybersecurity technology. This includes everything from enhanced encryption to detection of malware behavior when booting up the machine.
Security Capabilities of Intel vPro-Powered Business PCs
PCs built on Intel vPro come with a suite of security technologies called Intel® Hardware Shield, which extends protections up and down the compute stack. By adding safeguards in more places, bad actors have less attack surface to take advantage of.
Starting at the hardware level, Intel Hardware Shield helps authenticate various components and firmware during bootup and helps protect against physical attacks as well. It also provides a hardware-based assist to OS security functions and other enterprise security apps for active monitoring against threats. Some of these capabilities can even be offloaded to the GPU or lower-power cores so as not to overburden performance. And with all of these capabilities enabled right out of the box, businesses can better protect their data and their users without a heavy lift from IT.
These technologies work together in concert to make it as hard as possible for attacks to succeed. If malware does happen to get past these levels of security, devices built on Intel vPro include modern manageability features that allow IT to isolate, repair, or retire an affected PC. When new security patches become available, IT can also push updates automatically to the fleet no matter how dispersed the user base is — and can even access devices that are beyond the corporate firewall. This allows a business to stay ahead of evolving threats and helps with the holistic, proactive approach to security.
With these security additions to desktop and laptop computers on a silicon level, Intel vPro gives security professionals and business employees some peace of mind that cyberattacks can be detected and dealt with in a swift manner.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for INTEL.
Disclaimer: Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. No product or component can be absolutely secure. Learn more at intel.com/itheroes.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
