Continued... 17 technologyreseller.co.uk CLOUD WORKSPACES support. “In most environments, healthcare, government and financial services, about one third of PCs, sometimes half, cannot run Windows 11 because it's missing the security chipset that's needed. And to them we simply say ‘IGEL it’. Run IGEL on your endpoint and connect to Windows 365 or to Windows in your datacentre delivered via VDI or DaaS.” The same applies to Dell thin client customers. “Dell has just released a new version of its thin OS software that requires 8 Gig of RAM, and a very big part of Dell’s thin client infrastructure only has 2 or 4 Gig of RAM. Those clients have to buy new thin clients. That creates e-waste and is not very sustainable. We say ‘IGEL it’. Run IGEL on your 2 and 4 Gig devices instead.” During the pandemic, IGEL enabled organisations to keep working by providing employees with secure access to corporate applications from devices in their homes (and from anywhere else). For expanding businesses, it can also speed up the integration of an acquired business’s workforce to their existing infrastructure and provide disaster recovery for parts of a customer’s infrastructure that don’t already run IGEL. “IGEL has something called a UD Pocket, which is a small USB key. If your Windows computer is still running fat Windows and there is a ransomware attack, what do you do? Well, if you have an agreement with IGEL around disaster recovery or business continuity, you just stick that UD Pocket in your PC, and within a couple of minutes, you're back to a good place and we've IGEL’d that PC for you.” UD Pocket boots the affected endpoint to provide secure access to cloudbased workspaces including Office 365, Windows Virtual Desktop, Citrix, Omnissa, Amazon, Google etc.. Importantly, this is self-contained and remains distinct from the affected device’s installed operating system and files. Rising sales Oestermann reports rising sales in the five industry sectors IGEL targets. These are healthcare, financial services, government and manufacturing, which all have strict data/IP protection and compliance requirements, and a fifth, hybrid group made up of big thin client users, including retail and transportation. He expects some of the applications/drivers outlined above to give IGEL a boost next year as well. “A lot of new customers are coming in where a third of their clients are thin clients, many of them Dell thin clients, one third are PCs that cannot run Windows 11 and then for the last third customers are saying ‘Should we leave those on fat Windows or should we ransomware protect them with IGEL and get the TCO benefit that we see with IGEL?’. We've seen a lot of organisations go all in now on IGEL, particularly in the healthcare space.” An emerging area for IGEL, highlighted by images of stranded holiday-makers staring at blank screens in airport departure halls during the CrowdstrikeMicrosoft outage, is OT and IoT. “All those blue screens happened because a big part of that digital signage is running on Windows. We are now seeing a lot of PoCs for replacing Windows and running digital signage over an IGEL ransomware protection. “We proudly say that you don't get ransomware attacks on endpoints if you run IGEL and there are side benefits to this as well. With the CrowdStrike situation in July, large parts of the US and UK healthcare sectors were unaffected because most of their endpoints run IGEL, which is a Linux-based system. Nor does IGEL allow the whole reboot sequence that was happening. You have ransomware protection and also what we call manageability. Business continuity, disaster recovery are huge benefits of running an IGEL infrastructure. “Another is TCO. Typically, it costs around £750,000 to run 1,000 endpoints. IGEL saves 50-75% of that through not having to pay for all those endpoint software products. Your manageability is a lot easier, so you can basically divert your staff to do more interesting things, and you have significant savings in productivity. We have customers who report that their nurses are saving 40 minutes a week when logging in because they have smart login between Imprivata, IGEL and their identity access management platform.” IGEL it Oestermann uses the verb ‘IGEL it’ to describe the process of replacing Windows OS on endpoint devices with the IGEL OS offering secure access to browser-based applications, a VDI infrastructure that you already have up and running (e.g. Citrix or Omnissa) or Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). This helps solve a variety of problems, including costly hardware upgrades necessitated by end of life for Windows 10 The big five The five key qualities/capabilities that enable the IGEL platform to support growing demand for a Zero Trust approach to data security: q It is a read-only Linux-based OS – so users can’t unwittingly or maliciously install malware on endpoints; w There is no local storage of data – because users can’t download customer, patient or financial data or exfiltrate it through USB devices, the risk from lost/stolen devices or data theft by internal users is massively reduced; e It is a trusted application platform – a secure boot process ensures code hasn’t been tampered with, and if there is a cyber-attack rebooting returns a device to a known good state enabling organisations to restore services in minutes, not weeks or months; r It supports authentication, SSO integration and SASE – IGEL partners with leading authentication vendors including Microsoft, Imprivata, Okta, Ping Identity, VMware and Citrix, and with SASE and Secure Service Edge partners to optimize Zero Trust implementations; and t It has a modular design and small footprint. At 2GB, IGEL OS 12 has a much smaller attack surface than a traditional endpoint OS. It only contains what the user needs to accomplish their tasks, with additional functionality, such as partner integrations, downloadable from the IGEL App Portal.
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