Adventures in home working

I picked up a few useful bits of information during iForum this week:

1. Citrix predict that between 30 and 50% of people will be mobile by 2010
2. Some form of rights management is required when delivering to unmanaged PCs.  For example XenApp has a type of rights management, ie it can disable cut and paste, save to local PC disk, Print etc based on the results of a NAC check.  Microsoft have a much richer rights management solution, but its not currently integrated with NAC, nor can it be applied to all applications.  My thought perhaps SoftGrid execution environment could be NAC and rights management enabled, and therefore prevent certain things on unmanaged PCs
3. 10% of people poled in a couple of sessions had increasing IT budgets
4. 60% of people are expected to be working either from home or in branch offices by 2010
5. There were 1.2B mobile phones in 2007, expected to be 1B SmartPhones by 2010
6. 47% of companies now consider data protection now more important than perimeter security, again another hint at the potential growth of rights management if it could be made seamless enough for people who have rights!
7. An IDC study was quoted that predicted that knowledge workers would be working with 60% of their information sourced from outside the company within 5 years.  I can really relate to this, I think I’m way beyond that ratio already and this >60% is part of my personal knowledge management system, not my companies, although some small part of it is relevant to share.

Delivered by Steve Maytum – VP – End user platforms

1. Today
1. 54,000 managed XP desktop, two builds.  Modified the Gina to add a “borrow” button to RDP to a CPS environment or RDP to the users desktop PC,  this is similar to what CSC have done, but my modifying the GINA they have a solution that doesn’t force a locked session to logoff – nice!
2. 15,000 managed laptops
3. 4,500 applications
2. Investing in
1. 50 unmanaged PCs
2. 300 thin client devices
3. 3,200 virtual workstations
4. 700 seamless published applications, 4,500 concurrent users
5. 70 streamed apps
6. Lots of Blackberries
3. Investment banking is all about agility and power and speed of delivery, 140 changes a week
4. Private banking is about protection of data and stability, 2 big changes a year
5. Drivers
1. Cost reduction
2. Strategic sourcing
3. Increasing remote offices
4. Mobile and nomadic users
5. Home working
6. Availability of power and heat, green – in some building they are not able to deliver any more power to the buildings
7. Business continuity
8. Regulatory requirements
9. What their peers are doing
10. Consumer experience & user capability is driving a need to raise the bar
11. Increase in technology capability
6. Remote access security framework
1. A NAC check provides control over what you have access to, using an SSL VPN –
2. EPA Factory is used for the end point analysis
1. Service pack
2. AV running and have a signature that’s less than 2 weeks old
3. Personal firewall running
4. New version being developed to provide information on geographical location, whether they are at the PC console or remoting to it, checking for password protected screen savers
3. Pass
1. Access to your PC via RDP
2. Local printing
3. Line of business apps
4. Long inactivity timer
4. Fail
1. Just access to email and office apps, plus a softphone
2. Short inactivity timer
5. Citrix Access Gateway – Advanced Edition sits behind an SSL VPN
6. RSA SecureID
7. Citrix web interface used
8. Most users just use Citrix to provide access to their existing desktop PCs using RDP tunnelled through ICA
9. They have lots of users apparently who bring in their personal laptops and rdp to their desktops
7. Success so far
1. 8,738 user connections a day
2. After 6PM 1.26 years of work gets done every night
3. At the weekend 3.33 years or work gets done
4. Total of 500 years of productivity
5. Peak usage is 9PM and 7000 users on a sunday
6. Number 1 requested service
8. End state
1. Citrix PS desktop – 112 sessions per blade
2. VDI desktop – 40 desktops per HP C Class blade
3. Trader private blades
4. SoftGrid for application streaming
5. IGEL thin clients
6. Traditional PCs with app streaming
7. Thin offices
8. Remote users
9. Considering putting all the clients on a “dirty” network and do all client – data centre access over an SSL VPN
9. Interesting point that I’ve made myself many times
1. yesterday – business demand outstripped technology opportunity
2. now – technology opportunity has exploded, way beyond business demand or even businesses availability to keep up

1. XenDesktop running Vista
2. Client is running XPe
3. Showed AutoCad, great 3D model rotation using 5mb/sec
4. Vista 3D flip worked fine
5. WPF 3D app – patient records system – worked fine
6. Call of duty game – worked ok
7. Full screen video worked well too
8. Still working on high quality audio
9. Works on Citrix desktop spec appliance

Five simple predictions from Citrix with my comments

1. Virtualization will be assumed, the hypervisor will just melt into the hardware, the focus will switch from cost reduction to flexibility and agility
2. Applications will be delivered and not installed, not so sure about this one,  I think its true for a class of applications, but if you follow the citrix analogy of TV delivery, whilst its true there’s a lot of delivery going on its complemented by lots of “installed” DVD’s, YouTube video’s and cached TV on PVR’s.  I think when we say installed, we are mixing up longevity and integration with difficult to install and deinstall
3. App experts will rule the world, i’m not so sure about this one either – often the app experts are the end users, so if this means the end users will rule the world Citrix might be right
4. Consumerization will reshape IT, and for this reason I think we will still see things “installed” even if installation only means persistently cached.
5. The world wide computer is real, IDC believes that within 4 years 80% of data needed to do work will be outside the firewall