Published: | Updated: | Reading Time: 3 mins
More and more I've been running into scenarios where I have to use someone else's computer. I'm not the biggest fan of this for multiple reasons:
I'm a huge fan of optional bring-your-own-device policies at companies. I understand the hesitancy people have towards these policies. A byod policy means connecting personal machines to monitored corporate networks and sometimes it means installing an agent on your device (and all that entails). These can be mitigated: mac spoof, tunnel personal traffic, container tabs or different browser profiles, any agents and/or root certs can be thrown in a container or full blown vm if needed. However, recently this has been less and less necessary since companies will hand you a cloud vdi. The vdi solution can be great depending on how much internal access you need and how the environment is setup. For example if I can do 80% of my work on my machine but 20% of the time I need to access the vdi to do some one off thing I think that's an acceptable solution.
Now I understand the other side of this equation. If I were setting up security for a company I wouldn't really want a byod policy since people's personal machines are a huge attack vector. From a security standpoint I think the vdi solution is the best solution since you still have full control over the machine but the user doesn't loose out on what they like about their system.
Taking these principles I want to setup a personal vdi so when I'm on someone else's machine I still have some of the things I like about my system.
The original idea for this was to setup a browser-in-browser but after a bit of testing different solutions the resource requirements aren't that big of a difference between a full vdi and just a remote browser.