IT teams often face the challenging task of curbing the use of certain applications. They can encounter numerous incidents where the organization’s sensitive information has the potential to be exploited. Security breaches, which often lead to numerous phishing scams and countless identity theft claims, make the news on a regular basis.
Business users today collaborate through email, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer applications. As collaboration increases, so do threats from hackers and malicious code, such as worms and viruses. Due to these harrowing threats, a major concern for IT admins today is to ensure that their machines are safe, and the organization’s confidential data is shielded.
That concern isn’t unfounded, either, as a common cause for malware and data breaching is the use of malicious or unauthorized applications. For instance, nearly seven million Dropbox accounts were reported to have been hacked last year. And, according to a widely-cited Ponemon study, 60 percent of organizations have employees who frequently upload confidential files on such services without permission.
Another case would be an instant messaging application that’s installed and used by end users in corporate environments, without the IT teams approval. Now, many organizations are against these applications as they cause security-related issues, as well as a loss of work time due to personal conversations, an increase in workplace gossip, and other distractions. Organizations also encounter employees spending more time on gaming application
ManageEngine Desktop Central assists by suppressing every executable specified by the IT team. While there is already support for the prohibition of blacklisted software by auto-uninstallation, there have also been requests to restrict software such as Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and more, which cannot be uninstalled. Another popular request is to block portable executables, such as ‘putty.exe’ and ‘winscp.exe,’ which can be accessed without installation. To support these requests, you can now block .exe, .msi, and .bat executable files with Desktop Central.
By suppressing application executables, we aim to provide our users a safer and more secure environment for business . As an IT admin, you can now choose to use the ‘Block Executable’ feature to restrict the executable on a particular computer, a group of computers, or all managed computers. This feature would also be useful for blocking applications that consume a lot of network bandwidth, such as Skype or Torrent. It would also help in barring any unnecessary applications, which could affect the system performance, or even overload it.
While this feature is currently supported only for computers running Windows Operating System, we will be extending the support based on our customers’ business requirements. Let us know what your business needs are! We’d be happy to hear from you; please leave a comment below or contact our technical support at desktopcentral-support@manageengine.com.
