Does your organization use any virtual desktop interface (VDI) solutions for securing remote workers?

👍 VDI is the way to go except there are certain limitations but it works for majority of the workforce

When COVID hit we had 2,000 workers working from home and our personal area networks (PANs) just couldn't handle it. We threw up a bunch of virtual machines and ordered bigger PANs, but people didn't like the VDI/VIA environments for some reason. They just wanted to use their own VPN from their own house. 

But iPass used to have a neat little client we used that wouldn't bring up the VPN into a scan machine for patches and running services and everything. It did a whole bunch before it allowed the VPN to come up, I loved that. Because for these home users, that's what you want: to know that they have malware protection, etc., running, to just get their basic temperature to know you're not in trouble.

We use VDI when interviewing candidates, especially engineering candidates. If they need to access sensitive data in Amazon Redshift or something like that, then they'll authenticate using Workspaces. This is cool because you can spin up a VM for them, email them their credentials, and then it shuts down when they're done. But those specific VMs in the given block of IPs have access to whatever they need.

We have 15 employees but about 25 developer contractors all over the world. And since we don't have money right now we're using Amazon Workspaces. Then, we limit the IP addresses to only work from that to Okta. So, the only way they can access our resources is if they log into their Amazon Workspace—they can do their stuff and we have control of the whole thing. It's a cheap and dirty way to do it.