Mobile Virtualization 101: (VDI vs VMI)

If you work in IT, you know VDI, virtual desktop infrastructure. Some tools would be Citrix or VMware.

And for twenty years, VDI has been the king of remote access for laptops. It's great, and we love it. But then we tried to put VDI on our mobile phones. And if you've ever tried to navigate a Windows start menu on a six inch touchscreen, you know exactly what happens.

It's a nightmare. You're pinching to zoom. You're trying to click a tiny x button with your thumb. It's really laggy.

It buffers. Why? Well, because VDI was built for a mouse and keyboard. It was never designed for touch.

This is where we get the distinction between VDI and VMI. VMI takes the same security concept, computing in the cloud, but swaps the operating system. So instead of virtualizing a heavy Windows desktop, VMI virtualizes a native smartphone device like iOS or Android. So when you open the app on your phone, you aren't looking at a shrunken PC.

You are looking at a mobile OS that expects to be touched. Swiping works, scrolling works, haptic feedback works. It feels like a local app, even though it's running in a data center five hundred miles away. It's also much lighter.

VDI requires a heavy bandwidth to render desktop graphics, while VMI uses pixel streaming optimized for fluctuating four g and five g networks. So when you step into an elevator or a train, VMI keeps working where VDI would freeze. Think of it this way. You wouldn't use a hammer to turn a screw.

Use VDI for your laptops and use VMI for your mobile devices. Be sure to check out the animated explainer video after this one that visualizes the VMI architecture. Next up, we're going to talk about the biggest risk facing mobile security today, the mobile data dilemma.

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Enterprises have long been trying to strike a balance between the productivity benefits of a mobile workforce and the risks associated with mobile access to enterprise apps and data. In order to strike that balance, there are three key barriers that must be resolved in order to realize the benefits of enterprise mobility. Any effective enterprise solution must account for all three. First, they must be secure and regulatory compliant.

Second, they need to be cost effective and easy to manage and deploy. And third, they must be embraced and adopted by the employees that are expected to use them. Over the years, a whole range of solutions have attempted to meet these challenges from providing dedicated corporate owned devices to securing personal devices with mobile device management software. Companies have even tried containerizing or wrapping corporate applications.

Unfortunately, all of these solutions have failed in one or more of these three critical areas, security, cost, or employee adoption.

They either don't provide adequate security for the enterprise applications and data, or they are costly to deploy and complex to manage. Or because of employee privacy concerns and other legal liabilities, they are simply not used and are rejected by the employees. That is until now. Hyporia brings a new way to securely and cost effectively enable the mobile enterprise without requiring intrusive spyware on the employee's personal device. Hyporia brings all the benefits of providing the employee with a highly secure, dedicated corporate device, but with a cost and simplicity of bring your own device.

So what is Hypori? Well, the best way to show you is to give you a demo.

So here we are on our personal smartphone. As you can see, we have all our personal applications along with all of our personal data and photos.

Now as part of our job, we want to access our corporate applications and associated data. To do this, all we have to do is access our Hypori virtual device by clicking here on the Hypori client. When we do this, we are presented with another fully featured mobile device with a familiar user interface, but this time it's different.

This device is actually running virtually in the cloud or on a server in your data center. The only thing that has been received by our personal smartphone is a compressed encrypted pixel stream showing us a view of our cloud virtual device. The virtual device has access to the capabilities and sensors on our personal smartphone.

However, and this is key, it does not have access to our personal data or applications.

For example, we can start the camera on the virtual device and take a picture.

That picture is stored only on the virtual device. If we go back to our personal device for a moment and look at our photo library, you'll see that picture is not there. That's because that picture, that data never touched the personal device.

Going back now to the virtual device, we can see that other applications operate as we would expect.

We can pull up the maps application and our GPS location is fed from the physical phone to the virtual device, but only when we are using the virtual device. We can start communications applications such as voice and video and they work just as you would expect, as if the application was sitting natively on our personal device.

And, of course, we can access all of our corporate applications, whether that's productivity apps like Microsoft three sixty five and Google Workspaces or custom applications built by the enterprise.

And that's it. It's just that simple.

In fact, we often say at Hypori that the most remarkable thing about seeing Hypori in action is that it's unremarkable.

You are just seeing a demo of a familiar smartphone. It does what you would expect it to do. But here's the thing, by virtualizing the mobile device, you are overcoming those three key challenges that enterprises continually struggle with when using traditional approaches, security, cost, and adoption.

First, security and compliance.

With Hypori, since no corporate data ever resides on the physical device, lost, stolen, or compromised devices are no longer a concern.

Additionally, since the enterprise data and applications are always securely contained in the cloud, the corporation is completely insulated from whatever might be happening on the employee's physical device. Conversely, the employee has no concern that their organization is spying on their personal device.

Second, when it comes to cost and manageability, again, since all virtual devices are located centrally, their manageability becomes a snap. Equipping an employee with a new device is as simple as clicking a few buttons. Need to roll out updates or patches to applications? No problem. Do it once and it's deployed to all devices instantaneously.

No longer do we have to rely on the employee to download the latest version or patch from the App Store. We do it for them behind the scenes.

Additionally, if employment is terminated or the employee loses their personal smartphone, then securing the corporate device is done via the administrative console instantly. Once access to the virtual device has been revoked, we no longer have to worry about what data is sitting on the employee's personal smartphone because nothing was ever there. And three, adoption. The Hypori solution is easily adopted and embraced by the employees because it's a familiar non intrusive interface.

No longer are we bearing the cost and requiring the employee to carry around two smartphones or tolerate installing monitoring software on their personal device. Finally and significantly, we don't have to worry about all the privacy implications and liabilities that come with access to the employee's personal device. With Hypori, we can finally have a mobility solution that is secure and compliant, cost effective and easy to manage, and adopted and embraced by the workforce.

Finally, let's take a look at the level of visibility and functionality you have with Hypori's new simplified admin console.

The first thing you'll notice is a full list of users, their emails, and the last time they connected. You can filter and sort on many different columns and even export usage report. From here, you can also add new users and provision Hypori devices for them. Here you can select the device template and policies that apply to your new users. And you can either import the new users from an LDAP source or import them via CSV.

When you're finished, QR codes will automatically be sent to your new users. Once we've created these templates, we can assign them to users. Then the users provision the Hypori device themselves. To do this, the user simply downloads the Hypori client application from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store on their personal device and then they follow the provisioning instructions they receive in an email. For the user, going from having nothing to having access to a fully loaded dedicated corporate mobile device takes less than three minutes. No shipping required.

For day to day operations, there are a whole host of actions you can take for existing users. These can all be found under the actions menu. From here, you can start, stop, reboot, or even deallocate a user's device. You can change a template, giving users access to different applications, or alter the policies governing how the devices operate. Additionally, you can send OTP or QR code emails, send an MFA enrollment email, reset a screen lock or PIN or password, get details about the individual's device, examine or revoke certificates, remove a user entirely, or even download usage report. All of this can be accomplished from the new simplified user admin console. And if logging is of interest to you, you can take a look through the user activity logs right here in the admin console and filter based on time, activity, or user.

Unlike traditional mobile device management, all of this monitoring functionality only applies to the virtual device and this is absolutely key to understand. As an administrator, we have no control or visibility into the employee's personal physical device, and that's a good thing, relieving the corporation of potential legal liability that comes with having control and access to the employee's personal data. In closing, Hypori provides the enterprise with a highly secure, easy to manage, cost effective solution that is embraced and actually used by the employees. To learn more, contact us today.

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