BYOC

BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) is no longer a luxury - it has become expected from IT. There are two primary types of BYOC:

• Allowing employees to use whatever devices they want as their primary corporate workstations, instead of forcing everyone to use the same gray laptop model
• Allowing employees to access their corporate workspace on their personal machines - i.e. on their personal laptop or at home

A construction corporation with locations scattered across multiple countries was looking to enable the BYOC option for its contractors. With their numbers in tens of thousands, the company wanted to allow the contractors to use the company's workspace on their own laptops - without managing the laptops themselves, on any laptop model, and without compromising security.

Using Zirtu, the company was able to architect a BYOC infrastructure as per the specification below:

Device-agnostic workspace delivery

Zirtu executes users' personalized workspaces directly on the end-point device - natively, without a virtual machine. This means that every user can log in and receive his own workspace on any machine in the enterprise. To facilitate this ability, Zirtu decouples the traditional client-side computing stack into distinct layers, combining the appropriate workspace for each user and end-point device "on the fly".

Since the workspace is decoupled from the OS and from the hardware, Zirtu can execute on any device with enough resources to run the corporate applications - including all desktops and laptops (including MacBooks, which will also run the Windows workspace natively - not in a VM).

In addition, the end-point itself remains stateless, and does not need not to be managed, backed up or recovered in case of a disaster.

This way, IT gains the ability to truly free the users from adhering to specific devices or device models - to the point of simply allowing each user to purchase whatever laptops they want.

Secure BYOC on personal laptops

Allowing users to securely and efficiently access their corporate workspace on their personal laptops and at home is a long-time dream. VDI, initially a hopeful option, fails to solve two main issues: security and user experience.

User experience suffers because users do not have the same connection quality and latency as they do inside their organization. The result is a sluggish and sometimes unavailable desktop, which is frustrating for the user and is at most tolerated - not enjoyed.

Security is a more inherent problem in "desktop sharing" type of access. Since the user's own system is not managed by the corporate IT, it must be treated as potentially compromised. In the VDI BYOC architecture, however, this personal system acts as "host" - and now has access to the secure corporate workstation, destroying the security assumption.

Zirtu resolves both issues by using a fundamentally different computing model - providing native user experience, offline use and corporate workspace isolation.

Caching ensures the user enjoys completely responsive experience, not just on a bad connection but even on a broken one (see Mobile Workers).

Native execution ensures that Zirtu BYOC is inherently secure, since the personal workspace is simply inaccessible when the user is working in his corporate environment. And when the corporate work is done - the user is free to use his personal laptop.

Results

By using Zirtu Desktop Virtualization infrastructure to answer global BYOC needs, the following benefits are achieved:

• Contractors are able to use the centrally manged corporate workspace on their laptops, natively, including remote and offline locations
• By isolating the Company's workspace from contractor's own installed system, the architecture remains security-compliant
• Swift provisioning and hardware-agnostic delivery reduced IT costs, and shortened new contractor handling time by up to 4 hours.

Next steps

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