March 15, 2018 By John Harrington Jr. 2 min read

IT and security leaders have taken notice of Chrome operating system (OS) devices’ ability to provide employees quick, easy and intuitive access to work resources. They may differ from their PC ancestors’ reliance on storage and installed software, but professionals are finding some advantages. Depending solely on internet, web and cloud apps, there’s less that can go wrong and more that can go right.

As a prerequisite to Chrome OS enterprise adoption, IT professionals must first be confident in their security and manageability. For example, cloud app access must be secure. There can be no risk of data leakage, nor can those apps pose unknown risks.

Google has announced an extension of its management APIs to third-party mobile device management (MDM) and enterprise mobility management (EMM) software providers. Now, the IT professionals who rely on these tools can deploy Chrome OS among the mix of their supported operating systems.

Partners who use these APIs give their administrators Chrome OS policy management capabilities across their devices and users.

IT has traditionally relied on MDM and EMM tools to ensure devices and their contents remained visible, managed and protected. Now entering the mix among these form factors are the work computers, video conferencing machines, digital signage tools and single-use devices powered by Chrome OS.

While Google continues to bolster these APIs and management capabilities, IBM MaaS360 with Watson unified endpoint management (UEM) will work to pass the advantages of this new functionality onto customers, enabling them to manage Chrome OS alongside other endpoints in the enterprise.

More from

NIST’s role in the global tech race against AI

4 min read - Last year, the United States Secretary of Commerce announced that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been put in charge of launching a new public working group on artificial intelligence (AI) that will build on the success of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to address this rapidly advancing technology.However, recent budget cuts at NIST, along with a lack of strategy implementation, have called into question the agency’s ability to lead this critical effort. Ultimately, the success…

Researchers develop malicious AI ‘worm’ targeting generative AI systems

2 min read - Researchers have created a new, never-seen-before kind of malware they call the "Morris II" worm, which uses popular AI services to spread itself, infect new systems and steal data. The name references the original Morris computer worm that wreaked havoc on the internet in 1988.The worm demonstrates the potential dangers of AI security threats and creates a new urgency around securing AI models.New worm utilizes adversarial self-replicating promptThe researchers from Cornell Tech, the Israel Institute of Technology and Intuit, used what’s…

Passwords, passkeys and familiarity bias

5 min read - As passkey (passwordless authentication) adoption proceeds, misconceptions abound. There appears to be a widespread impression that passkeys may be more convenient and less secure than passwords. The reality is that they are both more secure and more convenient — possibly a first in cybersecurity.Most of us could be forgiven for not realizing passwordless authentication is more secure than passwords. Thinking back to the first couple of use cases I was exposed to — a phone operating system (OS) and a…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today