Today’s ever-changing business world relies more than ever on the generation, collection, and analysis of data. However, as seen in the recent Yahoo hacking incident and penetration of various politicians’ emails, enterprise data centers are increasingly at risk, and the damage to one’s reputation and wealth can be devastating. As we enter another New Year, it’s time once again to ask yourself: Is my business ready for the technological challenges of the future? How can I protect my data from the increasing variety and frequency of cyber-attack? Microsoft’s Windows Server 2016 provides several significant technological advantages and innovations in this regard.

Windows Server 2016 boasts a wide array of new features to bring the security of your data centers to modern-day enterprise standards. Its Credential Guard and Remote Credential Guard protects your administrator credentials in an isolated, virtualized environment to ensure their safety. Its new feature, Just Enough and Just-in-Time Administration, protects your administration credentials from being compromised by social engineering, brute force, or excessive employee access privileges; administrators will only have specific privileges for a specific window of time.

Window Servers 2016 also protects the virtualization fabric by isolating it from the host operating system. Generation 2 VMs, which support UEFI firmware and have virtual TPM, are Shielded Virtual Machines that protect themselves from being copied and compromised. This new feature allows enterprises to apply BitLocker to their VMs and ensure that they can only run on approved hosts. The Host Guardian Service (HGS) is a new role in Windows Server 2016 that provides health attestation and key protection and release services for Hyper-V hosts running Shielded VMs. This mechanism requires the Shielded VMs to run on hosts that have TPM 2.0 chips and UEFI 2.3.1, both of which are supported by QCT’s QxStack Window Servers 2016 Cloud Ready Appliance.