Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2023 Will be the Year of RDI™ (Remote Desktop Infrastructure)
By J.Tyler T.Rex Rohrer, Founder + CEO, Remotely, Inc.
For the better part of 20 years, I have gone on and on (and
on) about THIS being the year of VDI - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This time of the year I start to imagine we in
the EUC community will finally take center stage in front of Storage, Artificial Intelligence, Hyperscaler's, and Low Code. It sadly never seems to happen. And yet, we
persist 😉
With the full throated confidence of someone who has been
"not right" for 19 years - here it goes:
My prediction is that 2023 will be THE YEAR OF RDI.
First, a bit of context.
We have all felt for quite some time that large office
buildings, tiny cubicles, bumper to bumper traffic, and $13 lattes were not the
environment where we did our best work. Almost
overnight 500 million of our end users got their wish - and started to work
from "anywhere".
"Anywhere" sounds lovely. It also sounds super risky.
As system Administrators we spend the better part of our days planning, designing,
and deploying technology for known use cases. For this reason, VDI, and Desktop
as a Service (DaaS), and cloud applications are what we should have been
focused on. For centralized and secure remote access - they are hard to beat. Stateless
Virtual Machines with minimal writeable volumes are a security dream -
especially when coupled with an ultra-hardened endpoint OS. These solutions,
however, are non-trivial in complexity and take time to architect and deploy.
While we should have utilized these solutions to help our newly minted remote
users....we didn't.
We sent our users to BestBuy to find any computer in stock,
we gave them instructions on how and when to use the VPN, and we also gave some
local admin rights - just in case. This was because the use case got away from
us. Who was working on what, where became an unsolvable equation. We crossed
our fingers and hoped that nothing would go "bump" in the night. It did.
We can barely boot a browser without seeing a horror story
about a breach, or ransomware, or cybersecurity incident. So naturally this
begs the question... what do we do now?
Erring on the side of simplicity, I see that we have two
clear choices (doing nothing is no longer an option). I think we need to do
BOTH. Clear Choice #1 is we keep going full force with our VDI, DaaS, and Cloud
Apps models - they are secure and when deployed correctly at scale - save
money. Microsoft AVD and W365 are incredible ways to obtain the value of cloud
delivered workspaces with centralized and secure management. In finding good candidates for this among our
populations we can run dual purpose assessments to not only see who a good candidate
for VDI is, but also, who has security and risk exposure we should tend to with
Choice #2 (RDI).
The other Clear Choice (#2), specifically in a difficult
economy with an unknown future with tight budgets, would be to find ways to
secure and support the technology currently in our end users' hands. If we can
use what we already have more safely, securely, with lower risks, and equal or
greater productivity we are unlocking value. We may begin with systems that may
not have been selected based on corporate standards or configured when deployed
in an ideal state. Often improvement is more beneficial than starting over, and
incremental beats perfection. We have infrastructure - some we own, some we
control, some we can secure, and some we cannot.
RDITM describes the technology and risk management
framework (RMF) we can use to take any off the shelf commodity endpoint from a
big box retailer, on any network, and make it Department of Defense Grade
Secure. RDI is the model we leverage when we improve the security and
risk posture of the device, applications, data, & end user identity. RDI seeks to improve the security stance and lower
the risk exposure of the entire user construct - a true follow the wire exercise
to identify any potential risk. With RDI
we strive to also make the user more productive by anticipating and removing
potential security, risk, or configuration downtime. If we can do this - we
have delivered massive value back to our companies and it may be the decade of
RDI.
And a wise enterprise Security Professional also reminded me
that Remote Worker Infrastructure (RWI) is something we also MUST factor into
our equations. Not only should we strive to deliver the most productive
environment for our remote workers - we also must take into account the
variability in behavior and workflow. Everyone is different. Every remote
worker has their own specific risk profile.
2023 is going to see us all looking for ways to leverage and
extend what we already own. Rising costs and risk will compel us to take
security more seriously than ever before.
Our budgets will be stressed at the exact time we need them the most. We must endure. We can take meaningful steps
now to prepare for any scope of undertaking. Information is key.
Most transformative efforts in the modern enterprise require
a framework that anticipates, defines, controls, and measures the results being
sought. I propose that when it comes to the 500 million new remote users in our
companies, we need a NEW framework to guide our actions and implementations
that not only looks at what we might do that is NEW, it also looks at how we do
legacy, BETTER.
The model for this kind of methodology is well known and
proven over time. To get to a future state, we must know our current state.
That begins with a risk assessment. This assessment data should leave no stone
unturned and look at the true vulnerabilities facing our end users identities,
applications, devices, and data. We then
use that risk assessment data to analyze, score, and prioritize where we can
make specific improvements in identity, data, apps, or devices, or, if a new
delivery architecture is warranted altogether. Once we address what it is we
have found through compliance, configuration, controls, or process - we should
prefer to continuously monitor the results to ensure we do not drift from a
known good state.
Taking the very real possibility of a sluggish 2023 into
account - my prediction is both VDI and RDI give us the technology and
framework to begin to move past our current best efforts into real efforts. We will move into a year of activity and begin
improving our security and risk posture, while improving user productivity. With
the rising costs of cybercrime and cyber insurance, regulatory and compliance
requirements, and remote user support...my prediction is we see healthy and
secure adoption of BOTH RDI and VDI in 2023.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tyler Rohrer is an empathetically confident entrepreneur
with over 30 years of experience around end user computing. He is the
co-founder of Liquidware, a digital workspace management platform, and has
used his obsessive curiosity for problem solving to dominate the tech world. He
has worked in and around the most progressive and challenging deployments in
the world.
When COVID turned the world upside down companies were
inevitably faced with their biggest issues; monitoring, managing, and
protecting their now remote workforce. There was born Remotely INC, the world's
first Hyper Converged Console.
Enterprise companies with distributed users and teams are
experiencing the need to secure their systems more strategically than ever
before. Remotely is able to assess potential issues, giving visibility into the
current state of distributed users and teams, allowing the ability for
actionable remediation paths.
Advisors to the company include Microsoft's GM Frank
Artale, StackDriver and Google Alum Izzy Azeri, Nutanix Customer Success leader
Steve Kaplan, former HubSpot COO and Citrix Board of Director Member JD
Sherman, Boston Tech luminary Mark Shirman, Former HubSpot CFO John Kinzer,
among others.