IGEL Secure - On the 12th of June some of the Workspace IT gang got to spend the day listening to "front-men" from some of the EUC industries best vendors at the IGEL hosted "IGEL Secure" event. After a day absorbing information and some interesting discussions I decided to write this blog to summarise what i heard.
So lets get into it, after an early start at 6am I headed into London to the venue - 30 Euston Square, London. A great location and a fantastic comfortable auditorium which you will see in the pictures coming up.
After a quick breakfast we headed in to the auditorium for the keynote sessions. First onstage was Darren Fields, IGEL VP Sales, who provided a warm welcome and set the scene for the day.
Next up was Klaus Oestermann, IGEL CEO. Klaus gave an overview of how IGEL have re-positioned themselves within the market and redefined what IGEL's strategy and direction is. Introducing....
What's the IGEL Preventative Security Model (PSM)?
In my own words, IGELs PSM is essentially removing attack surfaces from the endpoint, therefore lessening the risk of a cyber attack due to a by design "hardened" device. The next pictures show some of the differences between using IGEL and other traditional endpoints operating systems such as Windows 11 and the additional technologies and complexities involved to try and manage additional attack surfaces and product integrations.
For more details on the PSM, you can checkout the whitepaper here:
IGEL-Security-Whitepaper_Preventative-Security-Model.pdf
One of the major benefits of transitioning to IGEL and its Preventative Security Model is the impact on cost. Everyone knows cost more often than not provides major influence in any companies strategy and technology. Klaus went on to talk about a customer that has saved over £32M over a 3 year period in equated cost. This was achieved by using IGEL on the customer endpoints allowing the customer to:
Next Klaus moved on to show the current landscape of IGEL Ready partners. The partner ecosystem is changing rapidly with more and more partners on-boarding to the program, each time I see an updated chart there are more and more vendors.
"An exclusive partner program designed for hardware, software and peripheral companies that want to develop verified, integrated solutions with IGEL technologies."
Matthias Haas, IGEL CTO took the reigns from Klaus at this stage and went on to talk about the current state of IGEL OS12, the App Portal and how its showing 25% more velocity in how apps are appearing bringing updates and new features. Local Apps on OS12 were then highlighted allowing more flexibility in utilising the local devices hardware for potential performance improvements - a key feature for me was the introduction of the Microsoft Teams Progressive Web App (PWA), allowing a user to run Teams in a browser directly on the IGEL.
Matthias expanded on more functionality within OS12 such as:
For me personally, a couple of those announcements are a big deal!
First, SSO from the OS level right through to the desktop or application you want to use - No more entering your credentials multiple times.
Second, Microsoft Teams PWA, locally installed on the IGEL. Unified Comms straight from the endpoint.
Lastly, my favourite and what I have been talking with IGEL about for quite some time, Microsoft Intune Enrollment! This is huge! Enroll your devices then apply Compliance and/or Conditional Access Policies to your devices like you would with any other device currently within your tenant.
Next up, Justin Thorogood took centre stage as a referee to chat with Jim Moyle, Microsoft, Spencer Pitts, Omnissa and Gerry Lavin, Citrix. Justin had the red card ready if things were to get out of hand between these tech giants. The panel discussed their views on the current state of their respective companies and gave a bit of insight around the changes since acquisition for the likes of Citrix and Omnissa. Jim caught my attention with his insight on the highly debated "AppV is end of life 04/2026" topic.
I caught up with Jim in-between sessions to quiz him on this subject a little more. After some digging here's what I learnt:
Realistically, the AppV client is going to be around until at least 2030.... maybe more... shhh.
Back into the auditorium and Joe Cleary from Lenovo was on stage to talk about how IGEL and Lenovo are "Securing Devices at the Edge".
This session had some specific use cases in mind such as Point of Sale (POS) devices, Digital Signage and Patient Kiosks and how Lenovos ThinkShield offers a lower layer of protection against Cyber-Attacks - right down to protecting the Firmware and BIOS of the device. For more info, checkout the Lenovo site here.
Now, I need to highlight my favorite presentation of the day, this was delivered by Nathaniel Comer, CEO & Founder of Sun Screen IT Group. What do Sun Screen IT do? I am not a good enough writer to convey the message in the way i received it so I have instead here are some of the slides from the presentation.
Since the event I have spoken to Nathaniel to get permission to provide a snippet of video from what he presented for the first time. The actual video was just shy of 15 minutes, once publicly released, I urge you to watch it.
If you can help or want to get involved please reach out directly to Nathaniel (link above) and he will be more than happy to speak to you about Sun Screen IT and their mission.
Breakout Sessions were next on the Agenda where I headed over to get an update on the IGEL Channel changes. Some exciting changes, enhancements and some insightful Q&A with the presenters, Justin Thorogood (Looking shook!), Ken Millard, Brendan Williams, Eric Kline & Mads Skalbo. Thanks for the update guys! Unfortunately the detail shared here is still to be kept under wraps.
And finally it was time for the the social afterwards to dig into the detail with a beer and some banter. Obligatory selfies with the main man Rene Recker who heads up the IGEL Community. Joe Cleary from Lenovo. And a trip to re-enact the Spice Girls Wannabe music video on the stairs in St Pancreas International featuring, Jim Moyle, Colin Eales & myself (Dan Goss).
Hopefully you learnt something from this post, if not i'm sure you at least enjoyed the Spice Girls reenactment. If you would like anymore information on anything mentioned above to reach out to me, if I cant help I can put you in touch with someone that can. Thanks for reading.
