What are the security risks if your employees are working from home?

If you’re going to be providing your own equipment, there are some other Microsoft pieces, Microsoft Intune, for example, gives you access to automatic machine setup and deployment. With autopilot we can do that, and we do have customers that are doing that. It’s about 50/50 with our customers that are doing that for WVD versus the ones that are letting their own employees use their own devices. The main thing about WVD is that you can do a WVD deployment where that user has no ability to put any information on their local machine at all. It is just a thin client. It can be a Windows thin client, a Mac thin client, a Lennox thin client, whatever it is and you can have WVD work in such a way that there is no additional security risk because everything is in the WVD session. And that’s a big thing for a lot of people.

If you need to go from 20 work at home users to 2,000 work at home users, out of that 2,000, probably about 1,700-1,800 already had a suitable device where you can jump on to WVD right now or tomorrow. No shipping, no provisioning, nothing. You go to the URL and use a web client and you can get there from anywhere, immediately. And if you want a richer experience, then your IT department would have to help make sure you’ve got the right remote desktop clients installed. So there’s a little bit of effort because you can do that on almost any device.

So, zero effort is let them use the html5 web client, a little bit of effort is push out just the RDP client install, which is a single install file. And then more involvement would be closer to a legacy deployment where you’re sending them a laptop or you’re sending them a machine or something. That’s if you really, really want complete lockdown and control. But even in a browser session, you have a lot of control over the information. Aside from people taking screen shots, which nobody can prevent. Anyone can hold their cellphone up and take pictures of what they’re doing. But aside from that, you can control everything else, even in a browser WVD session.