desktop virtualization

So why has digital employee experience become a board-level business issue now? And what are leaders beginning to understand that maybe they probably missed a few years ago, if we're honest? What did you take away from that show floor and all the conversations that you had?

Well, I think work happens on the end point where the employees touch in the technology, the laptop, the VDI, the mobile device.

And that's what DEX is really all about, right, is understanding how your employees are consuming the technology services that you provide.

We've been very good in technology at sort of monitoring the infrastructure layer or the cloud layer.

Not that those are binding.

but everybody kind of looks at them like they are, right? So, you know, a VDI solution or, you know, where is that defined at? Well, it's defined in a CMMC FAQ by the Department of War, right? Whereas where do they talk about FedRAMP equivalency? That's in the one CMMC document you have to read, right? Mm-hmm.

No, it's buried somewhere else.

So it's in all sorts of places, and you have to make sure you read all these documents and everything just like you were saying.

That's what you really want to cover.

And then you've got to make sure that you understand the CMMC overlay on that.

So if you implement VDI, virtual desktop infrastructure, for instance, you've got to make sure it meets the requirements that the DoD has set out.

No clipboard access, no map drives, no way for any data, no screen capture, no way for any data to get out of that VDI.

millions, if not billions.

The amount of attacks when I think the malicious actors realized that people were kind of pretty much jury rigging their IT together, VDI really came back.

Agile preventative

security model, remove those attack surfaces that just aren't necessary for the way that end users are accessing their applications.

Putting all of this inside a Citrix and terminal server type session, updating the huge piece of client software once in the data center and having everybody securely access it remotely was a much more efficient way of care providers being able to access the software and the IT guys being able to distribute it and secure it.

So that was a great use case.

And we still see VDI and app virtualization used throughout healthcare.

Cerner, now Oracle, that was always distributed online.

We'll get back to those roots ourselves momentarily.

But maybe because you had all that experience in VDI, maybe a question or two about that.

Obviously, once treated as a kind of source transformation in and of itself, you know, centralize the desktop, standardize the environment, etc., Yet the user could still have a miserable experience inside that even a well-run VDI state.

To what extent do you see DEX as representing the next and indeed necessary stage in that same journey? I think there's a big

difference between the two exact things that you described.

VDI is around sort of centralization, standardization, control, manageability.

But a lot of the benefits that it gives are for IT.

And I don't think your typical kind of VDI estate really thinks a great deal about the actual employee experience.

Life is beautiful.

Coop and Will on the call last night here on the VDI.

And by the way, we are at Fenway in the Ford Clubhouse Fenway studio presented by your New England Ford dealers and employee pricing for all you pay what we pay for the official vehicle of Major League Baseball and that dirty water.

It is Rich and Ken with Ted Johnson.

early warning thing to plan ahead the process, because that also involves the HR systems and whatever emails that you're sending, like all of those things, if you're relying on SMS to be the bootstrap, now you need to rethink that.

How are you handling scenarios like remote desktop and users having to use, you know, maybe VDI and other scenarios?

Yeah, it's a very fresh scenario that we had to deal with.

And basically, so certificate auth is one way to address that where you can configure your virtual desktops to use CertAuth in addition to, and then depending on the VDI technology, Entra also supports, if you're looking at working with Azure virtual desktops, for example, you can get SSO into those desktops using your Entra credential.

So those are two things that we have been able to take advantage of when it comes to VDI.

Because, yeah, I mean, if you enable SMS as ways to get into a VDI resource, yeah, that would definitely end up being a problem.

So we would start off as just one of the ways that we had taken advantage of it.

Right.

Outlandish idea not.

I have a feeling that next idea that you're going to suggest is going to be that we should be running VDI.

No, but I see another and I find I think that this thing could be possibly interesting.

I see another reason why we should be running the Active Directory at home.