Overview
Enterprise Browser Masterclass: Balancing Security with Simplicity
In this Tech Sessions episode, e360 experts Al Solorzano and Jon Via explore how enterprise browsers are transforming security and application access. They break down what sets enterprise browsers apart from standard browsers and why organizations are increasingly considering them as alternatives to traditional VDI and VPN solutions.
The conversation covers critical use cases including cost optimization for task workers, third-party access solutions, and BYOD strategies. Particularly valuable are the practical implementation tips and industry-specific applications that help IT leaders understand where enterprise browsers deliver the most impact. Throughout the discussion, the experts emphasize how these solutions strike the elusive balance between robust security controls and enhanced user productivity—a combination that makes enterprise browsers an increasingly important component of modern digital workplace strategies.
Listen to the Episode:
Watch the Episode:
Key Topics Covered
- What is an enterprise browser and how it differs from standard browsers
- Key capabilities and features of enterprise browsers
- Use cases for VDI replacement and third-party access
- Security considerations and implementation strategies
- Cost optimization opportunities
Key Takeaways
- Enterprise browsers offer a balance between security and user productivity
- They can serve as alternatives to traditional VDI and VPN solutions
- The technology works well for contractor/third-party access scenarios
- Implementation requires alignment between security and application teams
Read the Transcript:
[00:00:01] Welcome to another episode of the tech sessions podcast. I'm Al Solorzano, VP of digital workplace at e360 and today I'm here with
Jon Via: Jon Via, principal architect over here at e360.
[00:00:12] Al Solorzano: Love to have you, Jon, appreciate it.
[00:00:14] Al Solorzano: Today's topic, we're going to be talking about enterprise browsers. Enterprise browsers have been pretty popular in the last couple of months because of just a lot of security conversations, VDI replacements, VPN replacements, and so we're really excited today to talk with an expert in this field and Jon Via.
[00:00:31] Al Solorzano: So, Jon, love to be talking to you today and really excited.
[00:00:35] Jon Via: Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:00:36] Al Solorzano: Good to have the smart people on the call. So here we go. Let's get started.
[00:00:40] Al Solorzano: So let's start with explaining what is an enterprise browser really? How does it differ from standard browsers like Chrome or edge?
[00:00:50] Jon Via: Yeah, so that's an interesting question, because as we know,
[00:00:53] Essentially, everyone has their own personal browser. They have Firefox, they have Chrome, they have Edge there's some other ones in the market.
[00:01:00] Jon Via: So, when we're talking from an enterprise browser scenario, what we're looking at is we're taking that personalized browser that the users know and love, and we're taking that browser and we're taking it into the enterprise. And we're understanding that a user experience is not just a, hey, can I get to Facebook?
[00:01:18] Jon Via: It's, hey, how can I get to my work? organization website and what differs with a enterprise browser versus something let's say a VPN or a VDI solution is ease of use in your deployment with a VPN and other solutions, which will get into. There's a lot more complexity.
[00:01:38] Al Solorzano: Got it. So would you say you're kind of more managing the data and the application access than you are, like, say, for example, like the device or the desktop itself?
[00:01:48] Jon Via: Definitely. Yeah. I mean, obviously you've got your deployment methodology as far as how you're managing that, but more importantly how users are integrating with that application when it comes to data governance, when it comes down to what plugins they can use and potentially where they're going in the first place.
[00:02:06] Al Solorzano: Who would you kind of put as the leaders in this space right now?
[00:02:10] Jon Via: There's two up front, I would say from a enterprise scenario, from just names on a billboard you generally see Island is being one of the top competitors as well as Citrix with their secure browser.
[00:02:25] Al Solorzano: Okay. And then like, you know, I'm sure other competitors are going to start coming into this space. I'm sure, you know, Microsoft has some of their vision and Google has their vision.
[00:02:34] Al Solorzano: Got any ideas about how they differ?
[00:02:37] Jon Via: Yeah, so they're definitely interesting because you have your enterprise go to market scenarios like your islands and your Citrix and they are chromium based, which means they are utilizing a stack from Google, which is also Microsoft Edge, which is Google Chrome.
[00:02:56] Jon Via: It's an interesting space because Microsoft is also trying to break into the market [00:03:00] with their own solution for enterprise management. However, the way that there's differ in the current scenarios is you have to have group policies or some sort of additional agent to manage those browsers, whereas a true enterprise browser in the situation like Talon or your islands or your Citrix enterprise browsers, they have their own built in agent that will call back natively to make those changes for you.
[00:03:29] Al Solorzano: That's why we talked to the smart guys. Appreciate that. So let's talk about how enterprise browsers are addressing specific type of use cases or solving specific problems. So maybe we talked about VDI. We talked about VPN. Maybe just pick one and let's just go into that a little bit. How does it differ from a VDI solution right now?
[00:03:48] Jon Via: So with a VDI solution, you have a lot of layers to your solution. You have your user experience is always going to be the number one component on that. It's going to have your infrastructure, your knowledge workers from a IT scenario, how to manage the applications, how to deploy the applications, how to update and manage the applications.
[00:04:09] Jon Via: There's a lot in that stack for me true VDI scenario that takes a lot of work and a lot of effort for IT administrators, even down to the end users installing an agent to get into it. Whether it's a, you know, Citrix VDI or a horizon VDI or an Azure VDI. There's a lot of layers to get into that. And when you look at a enterprise browser, the simplicity comes into it where the users can click a link. And as long as they have basic access on their endpoint, they can run and do a simple install and very quickly access a full fledged browser that they sign into with their corporate credentials. It automatically configures it with, you know, their single sign on processes, their let's say if they have particular plugins for maybe certain extensions that they need for certain websites, even down to their favorites and dashboards.
[00:05:02] Jon Via: And so within a couple minutes, they have a fully fledged access to their corporate environment for all sorts of browser based interactions.
[00:05:11] Al Solorzano: Okay well, we also know that there's not only web apps and SaaS based applications. So how do you address it with an enterprise browser these days?
[00:05:20] Jon Via: So it's interesting because obviously there are more than just web based access.
[00:05:25] Jon Via: However, If you're looking for something, let's say it's an application or a tool that you need to install from a corporate network, you can utilize your enterprise browser to gain access to that tool to download, install, and gain access to that. So there's a lot of scenarios where you don't want to provide a VDI desktop or, in what we were talking about before, with a VPN, but we want ease of use to be able to get that user to get to those tools, to download those tools, install them, and get back to doing what they need to do in their day to day task.
[00:05:54] Al Solorzano: Yeah, so like in that use case, what you might be doing is a use case of certain users that [00:06:00] only need web applications or SaaS apps, enterprise browsers are no brainer. But for those use cases where they're like, well, I need a couple more applications, some of these enterprise browsers are now providing that VPN like access for those applications without the need for A VPN., right? Is that what I'm hearing?
[00:06:16] Jon Via: Exactly! Yeah, I mean, if you think about other tools that are out there or the common tool of per app VPN, this can help bridge that gap between the user, their corporate network, if you will, to be able to gather those tools, bring it down to the endpoint and be able to install those with the user's integration for it.
[00:06:36] Marker
[00:06:36] Al Solorzano: Cool! and so that sounds very familiar from a VPN perspective. You're kind of flipping it instead of giving everybody full VPN access.
[00:06:43] Al Solorzano: We're going to be giving them SaaS based and web apps first, and then everything else will be kind of VPN like access. Is that about right?
[00:06:51] Jon Via: Definitely, because if you think about a lot of applications as well, and coming from an IT scenario VPNs are great, but they're very restrictive for users.
[00:06:59] Jon Via: So, in some scenarios, you actually hurt the user experience when deploying a VPN, because you may require all of your traffic to go back to your appliance or your data center to then reach into the network to get those applications or to get those resources. So when you deploy an enterprise browser, generally you have a single point of entry, whether it's a DMZ appliance, or maybe you're looping through said enterprise browser connectors, if you will, to get back to the resource that you need to get to.
[00:07:31] Jon Via: And so the user experience is a lot better because you're not limiting the user to go directly to that data center, and cause all traffic, maybe not even actual work related, to loop through that, and that causes a very bad user experience.
[00:07:45] Al Solorzano: Okay. Yeah, because I mean, I definitely see when I talk a lot of customers that you know, it's VDI versus VPN and they kind of treat it like a scale between the two.
[00:07:54] Al Solorzano: I think enterprise browsers are a good medium. In many cases, I don't think VDI is going away. I don't even necessarily think VPN will be going away. But this actually can address additional use cases without you know, like you mentioned the cost of maybe the back end infrastructure for VDI or the complexity of managing an endpoint with all the applications and the security tools just so you can VPN in and use an application like this can be a very good bridge for a lot of customers.
[00:08:21] Jon Via: Definitely. And if you think about it just from a IT governance deployment scenario, VDI, like you said, a lot of stack that you have to manage VPN. Maybe it's simplistic just to say if you have a VPN, you're connecting everything through us for any either work related or non work related. And that works well in some scenarios, but there's management on both sides of that that can be a little or a lot.
[00:08:47] Jon Via: And so, like you said, this middle ground of the enterprise browser is, hey, let's provide what we know the end user will essentially need and not force them to utilize something that they may not need and cause a bad user [00:09:00] experience.
[00:09:01] Al Solorzano: So when people hear Chromium based, right? Some people get a little concerned, right? They're like, okay, is that really the way that I want to go? Is it going to be maintained and secured? How are some of these enterprise browser solutions addressing that right now?
[00:09:14] Jon Via: So chromium in some spaces is a bad term, because everyone thinks, Oh, Google Chrome, as we know, data governance with Google, they see and essentially hear everything.
[00:09:27] Jon Via: So when you're looking at chromium, you think, well, Is this tool going to be something that's going to be around for a long term? Obviously, big strides with Microsoft Edge now becoming chromium because they're moving towards a scenario of, we understand this tool is the go to market tool, and we're going to expand on that.
[00:09:47] Jon Via: So, with these enterprise browsers that are utilizing Chrome for their integrations, They are saying, we understand that this is a core framework that is not going away. And so by utilizing that framework long term they have a lot of compatibility which will work well for multiple devices. Because, as we know, Chromium works for your iOS, your Androids, your macOS, your Windows.
[00:10:13] Jon Via: Pretty much any endpoint device will be able to support Chromium. So, When these enterprise browsers are integrating with that solution, you also integrate other items like the web store for plugins. You can use a Microsoft edge plugin. You can use a Chromium plugin. You can use a Google Chrome web store plugin.
[00:10:30] Jon Via: The idea of this legacy browser scenario that only one provider can manage this longterm goes away.
[00:10:40] Al Solorzano: Yeah, and I've also seen where like say zero day security concerns that come out, you know, I've been seeing from some of these enterprise browser solutions. They're kind of getting updates within sometimes a week, sometimes even two weeks.
[00:10:54] Al Solorzano: So they're not necessarily zero day because they only get told. It happened on a zero day. They need a little bit of time to go ahead and do their updates, but it's been very quick and good automatic updates and controls and communication. Cause like you said, it's an open community within the Chromium world about how things are going to be moving forward with security updates and zero days.
[00:11:15] Jon Via: Yeah, if you think about it, and I'm going to use again the Microsoft Edge scenario, because they've picked it up. Now you have the full force of Microsoft behind you. So yes, there are always bug hunters and there's always competitions to find, you know, different CVEs and whatnot. But now that you have a much larger platform that's utilizing the actual browser they work together now.
[00:11:35] Jon Via: So, as we know, go back to the mid 2000s or so Microsoft was the leader with Internet Explorer, and they were the siloed off. This is the browser moving forward down to the chromium. So now you have not just edge, not just chrome. You have others like operas and things like that that are utilizing chromium.
[00:11:53] Jon Via: And so they all can compete with what zero day actually means. So it doesn't mean Google has to find a [00:12:00] particular CBE or a zero day. Microsoft could find one or a third party solution like your Braves or other things like that that can identify something. They can quickly share notes, come up with a CVE, come up with a zero day fix, and because they're all using that chromium base, and generally speaking, it's all built into that same framework, they all within, you know, hours or within 24 hours can update their solutions very quickly and not break their compatibility with what's already deployed.
[00:12:29] Jon Via: That's kind of the key scenario is that when you have this enterprise browser, you want to be very quick on your zero day components, but you don't want to break the functionality. And that's what Chromium really allows to happen.
[00:12:40] Al Solorzano: Good. So one of the things that I, I like to see when I talk about VDI solutions with customers is the balance between security and user productivity.
[00:12:50] Al Solorzano: One of the things I very much like in the enterprise browser conversations we're having with customers. It has a very similar feel, right? Which is we're still trying to address that security requirement that the organization has about protecting their data, but we're also making sure that the users are allowed to do the things that they need to do within the security controls and governance of the organization.
[00:13:11] Al Solorzano: So let's talk about some of the features that you kind of like to see around enterprise browser. Like you kind of feel like that, those are some, you know, interesting game changers, whether it's a security feature or maybe if it's a productivity feature. Let's talk about some of those right now.
[00:13:25] Jon Via: Yeah, so again, going back to the user experience scenario we want to provide the users the best user experience possible when it relates to their workload.
[00:13:34] Jon Via: So oftentimes, if someone's using a personal laptop or a personal desktop, they have their own personal browser, and they will have what's considered an enterprise browser. Which works fine one of the main scenarios with that is data governance as far as, you know, how data is moved in and out. So if we can take both of those use cases and cut them down to a single browser that they'll utilize, meaning we understand that users are going to go to Facebook, they're going to go to the Instagrams, they're going to go to Google and search for items that are not particularly work related.
[00:14:08] Jon Via: If we can take that enterprise browser and understand what they're doing within that browser and we understand that maybe they have a corporate website that they utilize, but then they open a new tab and they want to go see what's going on with Facebook. We can understand that both of those workloads.
[00:14:24] Jon Via: While one is business related and one's personal related can both live together within the browser. The difference is, is understanding how that one tab being a corporate tab, corporate workload is not shared in any scenario with Facebook. So you, for example, copy and paste uploading files. So let's say you download a file to your endpoint and then taking that and uploading it elsewhere, logging in from a corporate tab into a personal one drive.
[00:14:54] Jon Via: Those items can be locked down to a scenario where it very simply says, Hey, you're [00:15:00] not allowed to do this. Open up a new tab or open up a personal tab, and then go complete your processes that you might need to do in your personal life. And you have that siloed off scenario of, Hey, I understand that the users are going to be users.
[00:15:15] Jon Via: They're going to be doing these things, but we want to make sure that they're in doing the work that they need to do.
[00:15:21] Al Solorzano: Yeah, they're gonna try to find workarounds, right?
[00:15:23] Jon Via: Always. Always.
[00:15:24] Al Solorzano: Always, yeah, I think the features, like you were just describing, where you can say, as you're using the corporate secured application, and you hit file save, I can, I can force you to save to the corporate OneDrive, as an example, or completely disable downloads, as opposed to allowing you to think, oh, well, we'll let, we have to secure your endpoint, we have to trust your endpoint, then you download it.
[00:15:47] Al Solorzano: Well, once it's been downloaded, You lose a lot of controls, right? So keeping things within the corporate shell of the environment, but allowing the user to still have access to all the data that they need is a pretty big, important part for user productivity. I know the other pieces that I like to show off usually when I'm talking about enterprise browser is like watermarking capabilities or you know hash tagging or obfuscating some of the critical data, right?
[00:16:14] Al Solorzano: And if it's a social security number, maybe it's an account number and you can kind of hide it because it's all been done at the html level, right? Which is pretty cool to see because people are like, Oh, I have to rewrite my code to do this. And like, no, no, no, you can just say, here's the format or here's a field in an application.
[00:16:30] Al Solorzano: And if you see it, say, you know, SS number, hide it. And force them to like do another multifactor authentication or make sure it gets logged, right? Because a lot of this data that we're talking about gets logged. If they try to save to a personal device, you'll see not only will they get denied, but it will be flagged as you tried to go there.
[00:16:47] Al Solorzano: So a lot of security features around that, you know, those capabilities protecting the data, which is really at the end of the day. That's really all we were trying to do, protect the apps and protect the data. Protecting the endpoint is what we have to do to protect the data. Well, maybe we have other options.
[00:17:01] Al Solorzano: Maybe there's a different way of thinking about things, right? So, you know, maybe you don't need to secure that endpoint. What other features do you typically see that when we're talking about Enterprise Browser that you like to show off?
[00:17:12] Jon Via: So one of the key ones I think is really interesting is paid for versus freemium plugins, and so that's becoming more of a scenario for example, there's a great tool out there called scribe, and you go in and you can run that within your browser.
[00:17:26] Jon Via: And if I'm trying to train someone in my department how to do a simple task, maybe it's a go to a website, fill out a form, complete the form, send it on to the next workflow, if you will. It's a great tool. but maybe you don't want that available in your personal tab, if you will, your personal ecosystem.
[00:17:46] Jon Via: Or maybe that freemium plugin that your user likes to utilize needs to have a little more governance. And so as these enterprise browsers are integrating in with these freemium plugins, [00:18:00] it can on the fly register what that plugin is doing and say, wait a minute, you're now trying to access something that has been deemed as Questionable.
[00:18:09] Jon Via: And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to mark that I'm going to put it away in a little bucket and say this has been flagged. You can either keep doing what you're doing, or depending on the governance, I'm going to shut this plugin completely down and then notify the user and say, Hey, you can't do this anymore, and it has this interesting functionality.
[00:18:30] Jon Via: It's almost like conditional access where it says, what are you doing? where are you going? and why are you doing this? And in some scenarios, using that freemium plugin is perfectly fine but in scenarios where it starts integrating with data starts integrating with social security numbers, with customer numbers, with let's say if it's a medical firm and you have HIPAA and things like that, it can identify that and say, wait a minute.
[00:18:54] Jon Via: I can't do this anymore. I understand this is a free tool and you'd like to use this, but there might be a corporate option for doing that.
[00:19:01] Al Solorzano: Grammarly is a great example of some customers that are like, Oh, I use Grammarly all over the place and corporate's like, no, we don't do that because now our data potentially can be reviewed and seen elsewhere outside the organization.
[00:19:12] Al Solorzano: I think the same thing to you know, one of the features I like about a lot of the enterprise browsers is like password vaulting. So I'm a user of LastPass myself personally. And I also understand that like our corporate policy states, I shouldn't be putting corporate passwords in LastPass.
[00:19:28] Al Solorzano: Well, then that also means I got a user productivity problem, right? I got to remember there's four different passwords for systems. Maybe there's even shared passwords that I got to go like, Hey everybody, what's the password again? I forgot about it. Right, so I know the password vaults have been pretty interesting for not only for like you know, corporate based applications, but also for shared accounts.
[00:19:48] Al Solorzano: That's another feature that I like to see where they're like, you know, if there's a shared password between 15 people, I can make it so that no one knows what the password is, and it's still allowing people to authenticate and leverage that application and as I remove the policies and say, hey, John Smith is no longer in that group, now there's 14 people in the group, John Smith can not leverage, you know, that shared password vault which is pretty cool and pretty interesting to see. And again, it's all about user productivity at the end of the day.
[00:20:17] Al Solorzano: And, you know, BYOD is another one that we were chatting about earlier maybe you can talk about BYOD.
[00:20:23] Jon Via: Yeah, so obviously everyone has their own personal preference of devices, whether it's Windows endpoints, Mac OS, iPhone, Android, iPads. , I mean, there's folks out there that Which is always crazy to me, they can grab an iPad pro and they grab a keyboard and they can do all the things that they do on a daily basis using an iPad. I like to have my keyboard and mouse, but you know, individuals like to do that. , with these enterprise browsers, you can deploy this enterprise browser across any device. And the nice part kind of what you were talking about earlier is.
[00:20:58] Jon Via: Having that [00:21:00] flexibility of bringing your own device, what works well for you as a user, what your workflow is, because once that is downloaded from an app store, for example, if you're using Android or iOS, You can just log in with your corporate credentials and it provisions that endpoint as far as the the browser is concerned.
[00:21:19] Jon Via: So Going back to that example with your last pass. I'm a bit worded myself, but at the end of the day when you log into that enterprise browser now that workflow becomes hey I understand that there are shared passwords and so from a corporate standpoint, maybe you do use LastPass or maybe you do use OnePass or your Bitwardens and it will single sign on to that plugin and more importantly, download that plugin for you automatically.
[00:21:47] Jon Via: So maybe when you're on a corporate website, you have access to your LastPass with your shared passwords, whereas you go to a personal website, let's say Facebook, the plugin may still be there, but now you're logged in with your personal credentials and you can log in and get your credentials from there.
[00:22:04] Jon Via: And so having that workload and understanding how the user is going to integrate with each one of those individual tabs or those individual workloads is key, but more importantly, if they go and break their iPad, they can grab their mother's Android tablet, or maybe their, their kid's Mac OS laptop and says, hey, I need to grab this, I need to get back to work. They can go download the enterprise browser, sign back in, maybe use an MFA from their phone to make sure that they are who they say they are. And then they launch their workload, their application, and they continue doing what they need to do.
[00:22:38] Al Solorzano: Productivity, that's what really matters. I mean, there's other features like the multiple clipboard functionality, right? So that you can have a much longer list of your clipboard and copy and paste functionality all the way to automation of certain scripts and tasks that some of these tools from enterprise browser, they're starting to see, hey, you're doing these repetitive tasks over and over again.
[00:22:59] Al Solorzano: Maybe there's a way to automate and script some of these things and they're kind of seeing how you're using your web apps and kind of getting into certain areas. So definitely about user productivity is being pretty critical.
[00:23:10] Al Solorzano: So let's talk about use cases for enterprise browsers. We have a lot of customers that have been dabbling, POCing, evaluating the technology, but let's talk about a couple of key customer use cases that we've seen some big advantages for. So I know we had a pretty large VDI deployment that was looking enterprise browser. Let's talk about that one a little bit.
[00:23:28] Jon Via: Yeah,
[00:23:28] Jon Via: so we have a customer that was looking to reduce costs and When you reduce costs, it could be all over the place. It could be endpoints, it could be VDI, it could be VPN, it could be software as you will. So when working with this customer we were looking at where were they in their life cycle of their solutions?
[00:23:51] Jon Via: Meaning their VDI, meaning their software solutions and so as we're kind of getting through this [00:24:00] workload, how they're using it, where their costs coming from, we started to identify a couple key items such as they are using VDI, they're also using office products, and the users are generally just task workers.
[00:24:14] Jon Via: And I use task workers as the definition of task as they log in and they just click something, send it off an email, receive an email, repeat the process. And so when we're looking at this solution, we say, how can we streamline this solution for the users, streamline it for IT and ultimately bring their costs down.
[00:24:36] Jon Via: So when we're looking at the overall cost, VDI is a cost. And in this scenario office is a cost. So, if we're looking at those, we can look at and say, they're accessing email to type an email, respond to a form, and have a desktop.
[00:24:55] Al Solorzano: Use a couple of web apps, maybe, even if that.
[00:24:57] Jon Via: Correct, yep. I mean, everything that they're using in this particular scenario is all governed by a single sign on using a multi factor everything's web based.
[00:25:06] Jon Via: So we were looking at this and say, we can help reduce your footprint from a cost standpoint, from an infrastructure standpoint, and from a help desk standpoint, if we reduce the levels of complexity. So when we're talking with them, we bring in an enterprise browser to say, can we do the same thing you're doing today?
[00:25:25] Jon Via: The customer first says, well, we use office. How can we do that? Well, in this scenario, because they're just using Outlook, we came back with a solution and say, let's use Outlook on the web. We started with a POC, users started utilizing Outlook on the web. Anybody that's used the new Outlook on a Windows PC or a Mac PC, it's the same process.
[00:25:48] Jon Via: So end users half the time don't even know they're not even using original Outlook, they're just. It's hitting a button on the desktop, happens to open up a tab, automatically signs them in the Outlook, and away they go. So now we can look at it and say, you're using an E3 & E5 license. Let's go ahead and cut those users down to an E1.
[00:26:06] Jon Via: So now we have web access. So there's a cost savings there. Then we look at it and say, well, if we're now cutting that down to a browser, do they really need a desktop? So now we shave that layer back and say, let's go ahead and add the enterprise browser on their endpoint, which they're already signing into.
[00:26:23] Jon Via: So they already have local credentials. So now we have a single icon on the desktop. They can double click on that goes to a nice dashboard and they see their outlook button. They can click on that and now they're in with their standard use case of, I can go and type my emails up. I can send files, either PDFs or respond to forms.
[00:26:42] Jon Via: Maybe I have to go into something like Workday to go send a PTO request. They have that ability all from that browser. And now we've reduced costs even more because we've reduced, let's say, vSphere costs because they don't have ESXi overheads. We can start shutting down hosts, which saves power. You don't have to have [00:27:00] engineers necessarily focusing on, we have to make sure desktops are up to date. So your maintenance can be reduced. Those users are still in there. They have to manage your enterprise browser and your policies and data governance. So they're still utilizing technology. We're just reducing the footprint and costs of the overarching solution.
[00:27:20] Marker
[00:27:20] Al Solorzano: Yeah, I think there's, there's definitely a couple of different perfect storm scenarios that are going on with customers right now between windows 10 and windows 11, their hypervisor of choice, right?
[00:27:31] Al Solorzano: Potentially VMware and going down that path infrastructure, right? Maybe their, their, their storage or their compute is coming up for renewal. Heck, maybe their data center contract is coming up for renewal along with the endpoints themselves. And we even talk about like using like thin clients, you know, as an endpoint, potentially as a replacement to reduce not only the windows licensing, but also potentially reduce even further complexity of maintenance and management and other things that go along with that in the VDI world.
[00:27:59] Jon Via: And if you think about it from an endpoint scenario and great point on the thin clients if we can reduce that even further, as we know, there are large groups of individuals that have worked with Intune, with the SCCMs of the world. And so if we can take that and reduce the footprint even further then we can go in and get rid of Windows licensing.
[00:28:19] Jon Via: So we can save costs on that. We can bring it to a level that a lot of these enterprise browsers. And I will use Island and Citrix as an example, both have Linux applications available and you take those and put it on a managed thing client and now you've reduced your footprint as far as your overhead of managing the operating system, packages, security, hot fixes and the actual deployment of the application to a ecosystem that everything generally just works together in a lower requirement of hardware.
[00:28:55] Jon Via: Now you can even reduce your costs on your actual endpoint hardware, whether your laptops, your desktops, your all in ones.
[00:29:02] Al Solorzano: And that kind of also relates to our next scenario of use cases that we ran with customers, which is like third party access. So now you have Potentially unmanaged devices, or they're being managed by a different organization than yours, right?
[00:29:16] Al Solorzano: And you're trying to provide them access to your data and your applications and your environment. And the concept of like, well, I have to force them to use, Oh, we're a CrowdStrike shop. They got to have CrowdStrike on their endpoint. Well, that may not be what they're licensed for. , not to mention all the other security, you know, problems that come along with third party access.
[00:29:35] Al Solorzano: So maybe we'll talk about the third party access use case that we had.
[00:29:39] Al Solorzano: So in this case, it'd be like someone coming from an unmanaged device, right? Coming into the environment. and you're leveraging an enterprise browser function for SaaS and web based applications and for the very basic common like putties and SSH communication, maybe there's an RDP to a jump box or [00:30:00] something like that all through enterprise browser functionality.
[00:30:03] Jon Via: So yeah, when you're utilizing a third party solution and a, let's say you are a Contractor. Yes. So that's going to be one of the key ones. So with, and just recently, actually, I've actually had to work with this with a individual. So us being consultants and us being contractors, having to come into a customer that says, Hey, we need you to have a certain level of access.
[00:30:29] Jon Via: From my standpoint, being e360, for example, I don't have administration access to my device. And so when a customer comes in and says, We need you to do work for us. First thing we're going to ask is, okay, how can I gain access? Prior used to be VDI or VPN. And if I need to install a solution, I may or may not have access.
[00:30:50] Jon Via: I might have to set up a request for IT to be able to provide it for me. So something like a enterprise browser. if that is already located on our machine, so us as a consultant say, hey, we know we're going to use a solution for other customers. So we're going to go deploy this for you automatically.
[00:31:07] Jon Via: So all you have to do is when you get the request from the customer, maybe I get credentials from the customer so I can log into my enterprise browser with their credentials that they provide me. And now I'm gaining access to their environment for any and all solution items that I need whether it's getting into ServiceNow to request additional access or if I'm going into their workday to say, hey, I'm logging in for the day and here's what I'm going to be doing for the day.
[00:31:33] Jon Via: Having that availability to be able to get into the customer's environment, without having direct access or direct deployment into a solution like to install an enterprise browser is huge because now I can get in and I can take apart the well, I have to submit a request for this and it may take a couple days to a couple weeks having that ability to say this is very simple.
[00:31:58] Jon Via: Just if you have admin access, great, go ahead and deploy this, simple browser and log in with these credentials and now you've gained access to hey, I can go request this with my internal IT they're going to look at it and say, oh, this is a security tool, this is great. We'll drop it on your machine, now you can go and log in and now you have full access to the environment.
[00:32:18] Al Solorzano: I think you gave a good example of just us as even consultants ourselves, right, so we're coming in as third party where people are like, Oh, you have to have this VPN, and I'm like, well, I'm also working with this other customer that's got this other VPN and someone else has got this other VPN, and now suddenly you're like, I, they all don't play together well. And so sometimes they're like, well, we're just going to ship you a laptop, and you're like, right now I got four laptops sitting and I got to know which one I'm connecting to.
[00:32:42] Al Solorzano: Now what we're talking about is that like, you don't have to have full level network level access, you don't have to secure that management of that endpoint, and you could still provide the user in this case, the contractor, the third party access into your environment to do the work they need to do without necessarily putting the [00:33:00] organization at a security risk, which is a big deal.
[00:33:03] Jon Via: Yeah, and you nailed it. Right now on my work laptop, I have four VPNs or probably five now, and they don't play nice together.
[00:33:12] Jon Via: And oftentimes I can't go shut down the service to go use another one. So when we're talking these enterprise browsers, it's great because on a daily basis, I have Firefox, I have Chrome, I have Edge. So when I'm utilizing something like Island or something like the Citrix Enterprise browser they play well together because they're their own ecosystem across the board.
[00:33:34] Jon Via: Yes, they're still Chromium based browsers, and yes, they're still a browser, and they all try to fight and say, hey, I need to be your primary browser. But at the end of the day, I'm not limited to one particular solution, even though I have many solutions on my laptop because they're all in the same ecosystem, they all ultimately want to do the same thing.
[00:33:54] Jon Via: At the end of the day, it's what that corporation or organization dictates and what their ultimate solution is. From my standpoint, being a consultant, I can make that work very simply, that's the best part about it is that they can all play nice together.
[00:34:10] Al Solorzano: Good to know. Are there any specific industries that you think can benefit from Enterprise Browser conversations?
[00:34:18] Jon Via: I think most it really depends on what you're looking at because the main scenario is a lot of people think enterprise browser is just for HTML interfaces and it's not there are scenarios exactly. You can use other tools that integrate through the enterprise browser certain applications as well can actually hook directly into the browser and have communications back to organizations. , so gone are the days of, this is just a web browser, and so you could look at it. I just thinking outside of the box here banking, for example.
[00:34:54] Jon Via: So if you're in an accounting section of financials or banking, and you don't need the necessary peripherals like card scanners or check scanners, which by the way, In a HTML5 scenario, if their core banking platform was web based, you could use those tools through an enterprise browser.
[00:35:15] Jon Via: But hypothetically, let's say that you don't need those peripherals, then that scenario would be great because now you can get into a back end core platform very simply by just launching a browser and getting in using single sign on processes. and be able to do your work, other scenarios, hospitals, there's a lot of EMRs now that are working on going full web interface. And so you could walk up to a machine and sign in with your credentials or some sort of smart card and you could use an enterprise browser on any device that's in the environment and get into hospital records or prescription data or anything that's related to the EMR.
[00:35:56] Jon Via: Automotive industry as well. Let's be honest, a lot of mechanics, [00:36:00] love them to death, I love cars, I do a lot of automotive racing, Sometimes we're not the best with computers, and so being able to go in and touch a terminal, log in with some credentials and get into websites like all data where it just automatically signs you in.
[00:36:16] Jon Via: I can go get, estimates on how to repair a car, certain part numbers that I need. , so I don't think there's a particular field that enterprise browsers are limited to, I think it really comes down to identifying the workload and how to streamline the end users experience.
[00:36:33] Al Solorzano: Yeah, I agree, I think, you know, it definitely has more applications are becoming more web based or SaaS based, depending on which way you prefer.
[00:36:41] Al Solorzano: You know, that is definitely where we're seeing most organizations investing into new applications while also trying to deal with the same security problems of how do you manage the security around, 20 different internally custom web apps and another 10 different SaaS based applications and trying to give them one level of access with SSO all the way through, you know, and then understanding how app one absolutely has to talk to app two, but you want nothing talking to app three, right?
[00:37:09] Al Solorzano: That's a huge no, no, and being able to give or deliver those controls simply and efficiently and have those levels of Information for your security team to know someone tried to do something that they weren't supposed to. So definitely, I agree a lot of organizations, if not all organizations should be looking at enterprise browser going in the future.
[00:37:28] Al Solorzano: So let's talk about some pro tips. What would you suggest as a pro tip when it comes to enterprise browser and kind of getting started?
[00:37:36] Jon Via: So the big one is, is just really identifying what you're looking for, so when you're looking at an enterprise browser, it's pretty daunting.
[00:37:46] Jon Via: So understanding What can I use this for today, and what can I use this for in the future? The main concern is how do I have that user experience? So what is the level of effort to deploy it? What is the level of effort to get the users included into the solution because that's really one of the big keys is making sure that user adoption is is by far and large, like one of the main goals.
[00:38:12] Jon Via: So when looking at that, there's really no wrong answer when it comes to an EB. I would say when we're looking at pro tips, make sure that you don't have any additional overlapping tools. That's one of the largest ones where when you're deploying in actual Enterprise browser, are there other tools on the device that the user will naturally go to?
[00:38:38] Jon Via: And what I mean by that is if they have a VPN and they're comfortable with the VPN you don't want to rip the band aid of just taking the VPN off, but you have to understand what that enterprise browser will do to their user experience and how can you get them to adopt it in their own methodology, meaning they want to use that solution.
[00:38:56] Jon Via: Because if there is overlap, they're going to go with the tried [00:39:00] and true of, I know this, it works, it's not turned off.
[00:39:03] Al Solorzano: Yeah, I know I had one of our POCs that we did for a customer. The the CISO was definitely heavily involved in terms of configuring and going through the process. But it was actually the CTO who came in and said, I love this thing.
[00:39:19] Al Solorzano: We need to deploy this ASAP because it made my life so much easier, I want to use more of this, I want our users to use more of this, so it was pretty interesting conversation.
[00:39:29] Al Solorzano: I think I'll throw out a pro tip myself, getting the security team and the application team to talk early, right. , there's some cases where the enterprise browser is coming in from the security team from a security focus, maybe to replace technology or to address a specific use case.
[00:39:43] Al Solorzano: Sometimes it's coming from the application world where we're talking to the VDI or the VPN people, and they're trying to figure out how to reduce costs or make some modifications. Really what we're talking about here is just getting the security team and the application team to talk as soon as they possibly can, because it's the same alignment.
[00:39:59] Al Solorzano: It's the same goal that they're trying to achieve, but it's definitely got to be a balance, right? Make sure, all the security policies and governance are in place and then make sure that the users have, like you mentioned, Jon, they want to use the technology. They want to adopt it. They want to make sure that this is their default and kind of making sure that we balance between both of those kind of those both sides of the scale.
[00:40:21] Jon Via: Yeah. you're ultimately going to have champions in your IT staff and your champions with your user experience. So the idea is that, to your point, when you're talking to your application owners, or your security owners, your data governance owners, or your cloud owners really it's understanding when you sit them down and say, hey, look, we want to bring in the solution not to replace what you're doing, but to help with what you're doing.
[00:40:44] Jon Via: And then when you can get those champions on board to understand, hey, this is great for me because I don't have to do X, or this will help me, understand and make my life easier with Y once they get on board, then they can start working with end users and discover those users like to your point with the CEO of saying, hey, this will make your life easier because of X, Y, Z.
[00:41:07] Jon Via: And so once you get those champions together and understand that we're really just looking to make your workflow better and it in turns help the organization, it makes a lot more sense to take, I wouldn't say a niche product, but a new product and bring it into the ecosystem and help start reducing everyone's overload as far as applications and workloads.
[00:41:29] Al Solorzano: Yeah, definitely a rarefied air when you have applications that can solve and make the security team happy and make the end users happy for sure.
[00:41:37] Jon Via: Exactly.
[00:41:38] Al Solorzano: Cool. Well, that's great, so, I want to summarize a couple points we talked about today talking about enterprise browser. So we talked about security, we talked about end user experience and simplicity, both from deployment and the use cases and even making them more productive.
[00:41:52] Al Solorzano: We talked about potentially it could be some sort of VDI replacement, you know, in part, maybe not all, but maybe in part. , we [00:42:00] talked about a couple of use cases where VPNs also might be overkill and, and might actually be too much security on the endpoint. We also talked about a couple of use cases where third party access in an unmanaged device scenario might not be allowed, and you've got to bring in a solution like enterprise browser, and then just talking about cost cutting, right, looking at tools across the board and timing of scenarios and figuring out where organizationally, there's a lot of change that might have to go on and there might be a different way of thinking about how to solve those particular application delivery scenarios. So those are all great topics, Jon, it's always great to talk to the smart people. So I appreciate your time today.
[00:42:37] Jon Via: Yeah, anytime, let me know.
[00:42:39] Al Solorzano: Sounds good. We'll do another one. We'll do another one.
[00:42:41] Al Solorzano: So thanks for joining e360 today, Jon I want to say thank you very much, it's great to have the smart people here to talk about technology and I really do appreciate it.
[00:42:50] Jon Via: Thanks for the invite, I will come back anytime.
[00:42:52] Al Solorzano: Sounds great, so everybody, if you like this episode, make sure to subscribe and follow us.
[00:42:57] Erin Carpenter: Check out any follow ups for YouTube, LinkedIn, podcast player of your choice. Send us any questions. e360 is here to help. So thanks everybody, appreciate it.
[00:43:05] I love it. Good. All right. On the count of three, smile at the camera. I may or may not use this frame.
[00:43:05] Al Solorzano: Oh, wait. Okay. Hold on. Let me, there's too much shadow from this thing.
[00:43:05] Erin Carpenter: All right. One, two, three. All right. Good.
[00:43:05] Al Solorzano: Try to like Photoshop us and make us
