Technology Reseller - v29

technologyreseller.co.uk CLOUD WORKSPACES 49 you can when it is sitting on someone’s local machine in a Starbucks. IGEL is a very secure mechanism for giving you access to that clean version of the desktop in the cloud. That is our vision and that is where the 10 million seats are going to come from,” he said. IGEL’s relationships with Microsoft and Amazon are still in the early stages, but it already has strong working relationships with other workspace providers, including VMware and Citrix, which will continue and with which it does a lot of joint marketing, often making use of the UD Pocket. “Every Citrix SE has a little UD Pocket. They can literally walk into a prospect, plug it in and immediately convert their Macbook into a Citrix-enabled thin client accessing the test drive environment. Suddenly you’ve gone from a Mac OS environment to Windows 10. How useful would that be. It’s the same thing with VMware SEs, and we are just starting to get to that level with Microsoft,” explained Clepham. He points out that this is not just a useful marketing tool but a perfect illustration of the flexibility and versatility of cloud workspaces. “I want to see a UD Pocket on everyone’s keychain because then if you are stuck, if your briefcase gets stolen, you can walk up to any PC – Aunt Mabel’s PC – plug it in and boot to your environment. IGEL will immediately recognise who you are, because there is a certificate on that USB key; it will know who you are, find have tuned that protocol so that this Linux operating system accesses your desktop, which is in the cloud, and gives you a very high quality experience over the network. We optimise the signal that passes between the two, managing security and two-factor authentication to make sure you have a high quality, high fidelity experience.” New partnerships Clepham describes the Windows PC as IGEL’s number one competitor and is fully aware of the irony of its new partnership with Microsoft. “Our Number 1 competitor is Microsoft and the Windows PC. But they have now woken up to the fact that Windows has maybe outlived its useful life on the endpoint. It is clearly now much more an operating system for running applications and as such probably belongs in the datacentre and in the cloud. We now have this partnership of former enemies being complete friends,” he said. The IGEL Linux OS is built on Ubuntu, which is modified and fine-tuned by 100 software engineers in Augsburg to ensure it is enterprise-quality, works the way everybody expects and is fully supported 24/7. “The operating system has to do all the things the PC used to do and you have to have central management. That’s the secret sauce of IGEL. We can put the IT director in control of 10, 20, 30, 100,000 units and have significantly fewer people managing them. One customer is going from 500 desktop administrators down to 50, but typically we look at a 50% reduction in the number of desktop administrators,” he said. Clepham explains that because the IGEL system is tuned to run on any x86 64-bit device, it has a very small footprint of just 1.2GB, rising to about 1.6 or 1.8GB if you load in every one of the supported drivers. In contrast, the Windows operating system is around 10-12 Gigabytes and sometimes as much as 18GB if you load in everything. He adds that because the IGEL OS is one tenth the size of the Windows OS, it has a much smaller attack surface, making it more secure. It is also very granular, so much easier to control and manage. “Windows is so big and unwieldy, with a lot of unintended consequences of it being open. With all these different things you can do with it, it’s very hard for them to manage. It belongs in the datacentre where you can track the network traffic and see much more clearly exactly what is going on with the operating system than you on the internet, and deliver to you the configuration you need. All you have to do is tell it what WiFi you are on and you are off to the races. Everything you do is stored to the cloud; there is nothing stored locally, so when you remove the UD Pocket, the box goes back to what it was before. You have made no changes to that device; all you used was the RAM and booted from the CPU.” Clepham added: “One of my favourite use cases is when the NHS got attacked by the Wannacry virus. There were machines that were dead in the water because the disk had been fully encrypted and you couldn’t do anything on them. However, you could plug in a UD Pocket, boot to the UD Pocket and access Citrix, which would then get you to EPIC or Cerna, the electronic medical record system, and pull that machine back from the brink.” As businesses contend with the coronavirus lockdown and the prospect of more strategic home-working in the future, the combination of endpoint flexibility and security and the ability to work from anywhere is likely to be increasingly attractive whether used for Windows virtualisation or new desktop-as-a-service offerings. https://www.igel.com/company/vision/ In the next issue, read our interview with Jed Ayres in which he explains how he helped transition IGEL from a hardware- centric to a software-first company.