How to work in the Zero Trust era

David Wakeman, Business Leader for APJ, End-user Computing, VMware, talks about his company’s holistic vision where no matter what the cloud or what the application, you've got to simply deliver the experience down easily into someone's hands.

End user to “employee experience”

I started at VMware 12 years ago when we had one product called ESX and we decided that we wanted something now called “end user”… clients, PCs, phones etc. We launched desktop virtualization or VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). We got into mobile phone management and bought web identities. That space has become huge. We call it “end user computing”, but we could probably rename it into “employee experience” or “modern workplace”.

In the old days, you would have a desktop PC admin whose responsibility would be keeping the lights on, putting patches, antivirus and things like that. It wasn’t really user computing. Today we facilitate what I call the last mile of data and application. For example, insurance sales used to go out with a piece of paper, drive out to a client fill the form and drive back. Today we use an iPad. But, how do we secure it? How do we make it easy? Some sellers are inexperienced. How do you make it simple for them? How do you deal with compliance? These are the kind of issues that we talk about now.

Say you've built this amazing data centre, database applications and user interface. It's got some front end that the users got to interact with. That's where my piece of the business comes in. In this case it’s the last mile delivery of the cloud. We manage corporates and take on responsibility for every kind of OS: Windows 10, iOS, Android, Macintosh OS, Tizen, smart glasses, printers... We also do pretty much every platform, all the hardware form factors. Inside of that we take on the responsibility of delivering the applications that sit inside of them. We take on the delivery of the core-end of corporate apps. We do those things in a way that makes it very simple for a user to consume. We obviously understand all the security elements too. So how does end user computing fit in VMware as they're a data centre company? But if you look at it holistically our vision is that of any cloud, any class, any application, you've got to get the experience down to someone's hand.

The smartphone revolution

It's well documented. With the advent of the smartphone Steve Jobs said that now everything changes and he was right. Everything did change. Fundamentally. I remember we were trying to make a sort of sub-US$1000 PC to give to people and now suddenly you can go and buy a phone in India for say US$80. The second thing is you had access to data to people in regional townships in India. A fairly ubiquitous Internet paired with an inexpensive device is really powerful. It's changed the way people want to work and consume data. One of the largest banks here talked about how they empowered 35,000 women to not have to walk to the office to go to their bank branches in villages and they could simply use their mobiles. We are hearing really positive stories around mobility and putting applications. I think it also broke down the complexity around technology. PCs are complex. They're not intuitive. Mobile certainly has been a driver for businesses. I think we'll look back in time and say mobile has been the new steam to drive the engine of industry in society.

Managing all the complexity

In fact when we look at organizations, very very roughly, it's about one-third PCs and two-thirds mobile devices. It varies of course. You may have traditional manufacturing without much mobility but in other organizations with two to one and even three to one mobile devices. The interesting thing is that haven't we haven't seen the PC shrink. It was almost like mainframes are going away, but guess what? Every bank still has a mainframe. Then client server came in instead of having two applications you had maybe 50 applications per user. Then web came along and that added another 50. Then mobile came along and we maybe have 150 apps but we still have mainframes, PCs and client servers. But the poor IT person is now trying to manage maybe 500 applications.

I guess the opportunity for us is to make all of that simple. That's where we've made a business from managing that complexity. For example at VMware we have a Hub app. It has every application that I use. I can have my IT department put it into catalogue. It tells me about mobile applications that are available. I can download them from a corporate app store provided by the company and use it on my mobile. I can put it on an Android phone or MacBook and even use legacy Windows apps. They work well on both mobile web apps. We just virtualize it.

Security and the era of Zero Trust

In the old days you had a PC behind the firewall, LAN and a blue cable. You trusted the network and you trusted the device. Now the big shift is that rather than thinking about security based on physical location of device, we encourage clients to think about Zero Trust. So all your devices are on a network, but let's assume we don't trust the network and we don't know device you are using. So each time you access a resource, we seamlessly in the background check the user in a very robust modern way, not passwords, but something with more strength. We check the device and do we trust it? Has it got some security software and our software? What network is it on? Do I trust the network? We may also only allow certain resources only the corporate Wi-Fi network. It’s all done seamlessly. We have a Privacy Guard. We can't see as the text messages, personal messages and photos, but what we only look at work apps. We have a privacy officer to look into that too.

What is Digital Transformation?

India is a country where there’s a rapid adoption of technology with great technical depth. However different organisations move at different paces. Also, digital transformation is not just about taking a piece of paper and putting it onto an iPad. You've got to think about the people that are sitting in the middle of this. You look at the culture that you want to drive. You look at the physical deployment of assets and resources, where they sit and finally the technology that enables all of that. I think everyone got tied up on just the technology bit but it's a cultural and physical shift as well. What about people no longer working in offices anymore? What about people who are left behind or feel fragmented? You've got to think about those dimensions. It’s not like we just have to digitise the process and get rid of paper. As you go through digitization, something happens and lot changes and people resist. Finally it means that you have to have the right culture in place and you need to attract and retain the right talent. There's a whole bunch of well documented business benefits for that as well. If you can drive more digitization faster and the right people drive it, it leads to more productivity and more profits for the company.

Predictive tools for the workplace

We have Workspace ONE Intelligence and Virtual Assistant, which is on Watson, but we'll build across the other big Artificial Intelligence providers as well in the marketplace. Virtual Assistant brings Natural Language Processing that leads to a solid chatbot experience. We're using intelligence data to look into employee experience. So we can predictively tell when the battery's going to die or the hard drives going to fail. We can look at crash monitoring analytics and tell if there's a group of users who have suddenly got a high percentage of crashing in particular applications. We can actually start to see problems before the users see themselves. That's from algorithms that come out of Machine Learning.