To support new ways of hybrid working, it is necessary to address the increasing number of threats and attacks against firmware/hardware in an operating system. For this reason, Microsoft in its latest version of Windows OS – Windows 11 introduces a built-in Chip to Cloud protection that promises to keeps its users’ assets safe no matter where they work from.
Harden security of Windows 11 with Chip to Cloud protection
The latest edition of Windows isolates software from hardware. This protects access to key components even behind a hardware barrier making the system more resilient to attacks. As such, it’s really hard for cybercriminals to tamper with that data during the boot process.
In 2020, Microsoft protected customers from 30 billion email threats, 6 billion threats to endpoint devices, and processed more than 30 billion authentications. Yet most employees still struggle to avoid clicking phishing links in email, spoofed websites, and more. With Windows 11, hardware and software work together for protection from the central processing unit (CPU) all the way to the cloud so our customers can enable hybrid productivity and high-quality employee experiences without compromising security, mentions a Windows 11 blog post.
It’s clear, all Windows 11 supported CPUs will be equipped with an embedded Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip to support secure boot, support virtualization-based security (VBS), and specific VBS capabilities. Consequently, this will raise the security baseline by requiring more modern CPUs to have these capabilities enabled by default for protection against more sophisticated attacks.
Users can also enforce compliance and conditional access to their systems with modern device management (MDM) services such as Microsoft Intune. It will work with Microsoft Azure Active Directory to control access to applications and data through the cloud.
The only key hurdle as we foresee in upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 is the requirement for an 8th or newer generation Intel processor, or an AMD Zen 2 series, or a newer version.
