The Virtual Workspace Infrastructure (VWI) Platform

Global and Secure: A Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) and DaaS Replacement

The ability for companies to deploy a process accessible from any location that safeguards data, source code and other critical assets (even if users are using their own devices) provides them a great replacement for legacy technology such as a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provided by Citrix and VMWare (Horizon product). When used for code development, VDI's notoriously suffer from usability issues in addition from a complex and expensive set up. Usability and developer's productivity is hindered by the lagging displays of remote desktops. VDI's complexity is multifaceted, often requires significant IT support which results in high indirect costs.

In contrast, Cloud IDE's accessed from workspaces are executing natively in the browser and are as swift as their locally-installed siblings. Importantly, companies data stays within the boundaries of their Cloud provider's location (or the on-premise server) and never reaches the user's device. In other words, users have no local copies of the data. This is great for companies needing to comply with regulations about data location. In addition, the platform implements Zero-Trust Architecture principles such that data access is under granular and dynamic control across the entire process.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of a VWI over a VDI is that it includes all the collaborative and security features that are necessary to fully guarranty high productivity, usability and security for a global development process. By contrast, VDIs or Desktop as a service (DaaS) provide general purpose desktops. Therefore, most security features have to be implemented separately and at additional cost (see DIY notes in the table below). Our VWI is therefore more economical and delivers a full process implementation from the onset. It requires much lighter maintenance, and provides greater overall return on investment. The table below compares important features between both types of solutions.

Lastly, companies using VWI are in control of the entire development process from a monitoring perspective because of the all-encompassing process implementation. This allows them to perform continuous auditing without any additional setting. They access a single source of truth, i.e. comprehensive logs based on events collected across the entire process (see screenshot below).

Zero-Trust Architecture Design Principles

Besides being a great platform for collaboration and productive operations, our VWI implements the design principles of a Zero-Trust architecture, based on the definition of the NIST Special Publication 800-207. The Zero-Trust approach is a shift in security that focuses on protecting data resources through the application of well-known security design principles. Important principles such as Least-Privilege Access and Network Segmentations are leveraged and built upon with novel concepts such as:

• Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) models, an evolution of the Role-Based model, and
• Micro-Segmentation, an evolution of network segmentation, in particular when applied to Cloud resources and at multiple levels of process abstractions.

The goal is to obtain dynamically and continuously assessed security policies that enforce business rules across the entire process.

In addition, the process is equipped with security functions such as strong authentication with 2FA, data encryption and Data Loss Prevention such that the company's data is protected whoever has access to it. Finally, the process is continuously monitored and includes the generation of live events. This allows Compliance Managers to economically and easily abide to regulations such as ISO 27001 in the scope of a coding and Data Science development process. Descriptions of the VWI platform's security features are available by choosing any of these buttons below.