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Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

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Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#191

Post by cptskippy »

JTbane wrote: post #34
cptskippy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready…

I absolutely hate using VMs over VPNs, any slight interruption in my fragile home Wi-Fi (or whatever the hell the VPN is doing) causes my whole dev environment to freeze. It's a security/usability trade off for me.

I did development on a VM for 4 years because the corporate policy was to issue everyone the same spec machine. An i5 with 8GB of RAM and 120GB SSD is a lot more pain than a VM.

I work on a lot of systems with public and private facing endpoints and so I have a remote session running on a machine outside our network as well.

It works pretty well.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#192

Post by jb0x168 »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #170
donmcronald wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VDI angle makes the most sense out of all the answers I've seen. However, I can't imagine anyone concerned about security would do BYOD for laptops or desktops. Every person I've ever seen using VDI has a company PC plus a virtual desktop, so there's no cost savings there. The main advantages I can see are easier backups and not having to worry about network bandwidth too much (just enough for RDP is good), but t…

Yubikey webauthn over RDP works just fine for me.

Is there an extension needed or is this a recent addition?

I've spent way too long reconfiguring yubikeys to act as an OTP device so that they work over RDP.

(edit: reconfiguration is needed to capture the device ID/secret and get them registered to our MFA provider as an OTP token, I realize they do OTP OOB :) )

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#193

Post by lenkite »

formerly_proven wrote: post #35
cptskippy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use a lot of contractor developers, being able to provision out devices for temporary work is powerful. A lot of time is spent provisioning machines, white listing ips, setting up VPNs, and getting the contractor to the point where they can work. In some cases I've seen it take 2 or 3 weeks to get a contractor up and running on a 6 month contract. Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready…

Okay, now I'm just laughing out loud. My org has an internal/external reputation for not exactly being fast moving and having convoluted IT processes, yet we can onboard people within a few days. If it takes you 2-3 weeks to onboard ANYONE please realize that your IT processes are complete, unmitigated garbage. Paying Microsoft for some Windows VMs through the nose isn't going to change anything about that.

You have tens-of-thousands of profitable companies with such "unmitigated garbage" IT processes. Since they continue to remain profitable despite disaster-IT, they exist and hence will buy stuff like this.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#194

Post by hogFeast »

Closi wrote: post #174
hogFeast wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not talking Microsoft or Google. There are lots of smaller companies that provide this service. Your point about game streaming being like a search engine is nonsensical.

Exactly, just because two or more companies offer both game streaming and VMs doesn’t necessarily mean that those things are similar. They may be, or may not be, but your logic to say that they are similar isn’t right (otherwise other product lines must be similar by extension).

Right, but these are small companies that offer no other services. In both cases, they just offer VMs. Game streaming is a VM.

I am not talking about Microsoft and Google. I know a guy who runs one of these companies: they offer VMs for gaming, they offer VMs for offices, the machines are set up identically.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#195

Post by tatersolid »

908B64B197 wrote: post #86
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We don’t give admin right to install software” (except they do, you just need to ask the right person - there is always someone who will)

If you don't have admin on your workstation, that's a huge red flag.

Nearly every compromised or bricked workstation I’ve seen in the last 20 years was a developer’s (or QA) machine with local root/admin.

Standard users don’t get local root/admin in a corporate environment since the Win2k days, and seem to have few issues in comparison.

Many devs seem perfectly willing to pull any random executable off the internet and run it without inspection or concern. Because they “know what they are doing”, right?

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#196

Post by tatersolid »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #17
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it? Yes. Also, maintaining a fleet of hardware is a resource suck. Being able to provision everyone with something like this lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security. (It should also make onboarding much smoother.)

> lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security How do they protect against an attacker compromising this client, waiting until the employee is asleep or away for a few minutes, then using the employee's session to compromise the remote machine? Even if session establishment requires 2FA, the attacker could keep the session alive after the user attempts to close it.

You turn the hardware client into a cheap fixed function device that doesn’t need a thousand vulnerable legacy components only runs signed and approved binaries with secure boot.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#197

Post by mattl »

tomjen3 wrote: post #88
iddan wrote: post #2

With fibber internet increasingly becoming standard around the world and 5G it makes perfect sense people will use their computer as a terminal for a more powerful computer in the cloud than buying powerful computers

That would make sense indeed, if the prices for 365 weren't so damm high. And if we had a computer that could be a dumb terminal - it would cost 10-20 dollars, have wifi, ethernet, an HDMI connection and support a mouse and a keyboard.

So a Raspberry Pi?

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#198

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

tatersolid wrote: post #196
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security How do they protect against an attacker compromising this client, waiting until the employee is asleep or away for a few minutes, then using the employee's session to compromise the remote machine? Even if session establishment requires 2FA, the attacker could keep the session alive after the user attempts to close it.

You turn the hardware client into a cheap fixed function device that doesn’t need a thousand vulnerable legacy components only runs signed and approved binaries with secure boot.

That doesn't apply in the case I was discussing though, where the employees are supposed to use their personal devices.
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