CTO Daily Dose - VDI as a security option
Transcript
hi scuse Hauser from the CTO of Iser with today's CTO daily dose so in the news recently there's been a lot made of viruses like the petiole virus and how it spread through organizations like Merck really big global fortune 500 and has caught a hundred to two hundred million dollars and physical losses this is one of those things I have to give a typical cap to Greg Ferrell for the packet pushers who has come to the other side of the equation who's argued that security can
cost organizations real money and this is an example of security costing murders legitimate losses the business has been touched shut down for weeks and effectively when you look at something like a drunk manufacturer and they're unable unable to ship product this can be a life-saving incident you can look at hospitals etc but the idea that your organization can be crippled because of a desktop virus this is something that we haven't been accustomed to and quite some time I think probably the closest thing when you come
to this and in the past years has been cold red virus and we saw early drumbeat as a response to that that a VDI could potentially be a solution to that edge bandwidth and edge network connectivity has been an issue in the past but maybe not so much anymore because we have such a much more mature ability to deliver VDI I was listening to Don Delfino over on speaking Ted this past week on how he's talking to customers from a mean work perspective out about protecting
the edge and the business from viruses such as Pena the concept is simple in the data center we've perfected this virtualization to the point that we're starting to say is a hypervisor a commodity but we haven't pushed this down to basically any other spots of the environment you know Citrix VMware Cisco and a bunch of other vendors are talking about sulfur defying networking in the ability to use a network hypervisor to capture the current state of your network and then replay that and in the case
of a missed configuration same thing we do in the data center for server virtualization this concept there's no reason why it doesn't exist on at the desktop leave VDI has been around for a long time we've talked about the Year VDI over and over again at my last for time job I abandon the desktop I was just frustrated you know we and the balance of trying to keep end-users protected we come up with these applications dop antivirus IPS intrusion protection systems we put all of this
heavy infrastructure on desktops slow them down to the point where they're unusable I mean I don't care what you have a Microsoft Surface the latest greatest HPE dáil technologies workstation if you put too much virus protection and security on a solution it will bring it to his knees so I abandoned my corporate desktop and just used VDI between approved solutions like 100 Drive etc when I was disconnected from the network I just still work so VDI was my preferred method to interact with enterprise applications the
other advantage of VDI beyond BYOD bring your own device is the ability to encapsulate these legacy applications so lot of instances these viruses have taken football because of legacy systems like Windows if I have Windows XP on the dock I've worked in a manufacturing environment before if dirty it's difficult is it's just oh it's a it's one of the more difficult areas to support computer so VDI from from just that perspective makes sense however one of the other problems is that these applications are really updated
so the need to continue to run and Windows XP image to support a mission-critical shipping application I have a buddy who goes around and makes periodic backups of hard drives because their manufacturing process is predicated on these windows XP terminals and a VDI solution we can encapsulate that image we can do a p2p virtualized that image that specific workstation create a gold image of it every time there is a update or security vulnerability we can apply the patches to that if there is something if something
goes arrive can revert back to the known good image even if data is encrypted we can that is now part of our datacenter backup strategy so we're no longer backing up individual machines so while this may not be the year VDI this is the year that we should take VDI pretty serious especially as we struggle through supporting legacy applications out on the edge now VDI isn't the cure-all because we have embedded systems that have Windows XP code etc so we will need to continue to take
a segregation approach to our manufacturing floor and our docking our dock and and physical shipping shipping and receiving areas that have isolated environments that require embedded systems that we can't simply virtualize but there's other strategies there's no reason if we have a desktop in today's environment that has a legacy operating system that we can't protect our organizations at least through something as simple as VDI or we'll get into micro segmentation in the future set solution on solutions like aluminum a liminal which are geared towards specific
workstations and workstation environments that's it for this CTO visor daily dose tell me what you think about oh I have a keyboard up and running who knew but tell me what you think about the virtual screen I haven't drawn anything today but I really want feedback do we go back to the whiteboard format or we use this monitor way to present ideas visit me on the web the CTO visor comm on Twitter X CTO advisor subscribe to the podcast raitis and I tools talk to you
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