WWLW Ep. 15: The Case of The Safer, Smoother VDI & DaaS Experience

What we know  

Jason is working with a global financial institution with a large VDI deployment. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) rapidly grew in popularity as more workers left the traditional office environment. The IT team likes the control and manageability of virtual desktops, but have also discovered that the end-user experience can be dreadful, particularly for their global employees on limited bandwidth connections. When this customer learned about Island, they saw an opportunity to improve the virtual desktop experience across the board.

What we learned

This customer had two different challenges with their virtual desktop environment:

First, they found that many of their users logged on to the virtual desktop every day and primarily used just one application: the web browser! The added round-trip network path for every web request meant their browsing experience was degraded. It’s also a significant expense to the company, paying for the bandwidth, VDI or DaaS platforms, plus the administrative staff to manage it.

The other challenge was around data security and application access. Employees need secure access to protected applications that handle financial and customer data. Their VDI environment was configured to connect to their private network, but they wanted more granularity and easier auditing of user activity. Ideally, their employees would only connect to their private network when interacting with protected applications, rather than the always-on connection within the virtual desktop.

What happened next

Jason helped this customer to deploy Island, the Enterprise Browser to satisfy both requirements. For the users whose work is primarily through SaaS and web applications, Island offers a faster and more efficient connection path. They can launch the Enterprise Browser from their desktop directly, without the added overhead of virtualization. Island protects all their browsing activity and grants access to all their web applications, even those on the protected network via Island Private Access.

Island was also installed as an application within the virtual desktop environment. Now the users who require non-web applications can use those within their virtual desktop and launch the Enterprise Browser for web access. The Security team gains valuable logging and analytics about all web activity and can ensure a safe browsing experience for all of their users.

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