Bring Your Own Corporate VM

Raise your hand if you are getting a little sick of the phrase “consumerization of IT”.  I know I am.  But the concepts around it are interesting and they pose some interesting challenges for IT organizations as they are increasingly forced to support connections to the corporate network from a wide variety of devices that aren’t corporate assets.

As I was perusing the new downloads on the microsoft.com download center, I stumbled across an interesting guide called, “Consumerization of IT Test Lab Guide: Hyper-V Windows 8 corporate virtual machine on personal computer”.  This is an interesting guide.  In essence it describes a design where you could deploy and manage a virtual machine that is part of the corporate managed infrastructure, but it is running from a non managed consumer PC running Windows 8.  There are of course some interesting requirements to allow for such a design.

I’m not sure how mainstream a design like this will become, but nevertheless, this is probably worth a read and your consideration.  If nothing else, it will be good training to walk through the guide and design principles.  Here’s the abstract:

“Thinking about Consumerization of IT (CoIT) necessarily leads to some security and management challenges.

Microsoft has enabled CoIT through many technologies for many years and now helps IT managers face security, compliance and compatibility issues they might deal with and give users access to corporate intellectual property from ubiquitous devices, both managed and unmanaged.

More specifically, this document deals with the situation where a company would like to put in place a “Bring You Own Device” (BYOD) environment. For that purpose, the document demonstrates how Microsoft technologies such as Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 can allow to work anywhere with an employee's Windows 8 computer hosting a corporate virtual machine (VM) protected by BitLocker, while enjoying connectivity to his workplace. In such a context, the Windows 8 Client Hyper-V technology and DirectAccess technologies are used to implement this CoIT scenario.

This document is part of a series of documents on Consumerization of IT, and more especially aims at demonstrating the Hyper-V Windows 8 Enterprise Virtual Machine on personal computer scenario in a logical progression.”

Go get it @ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34776.