624 Navigating the Hybrid Work Revolution - Beyond Traditional VPNs

[Uncle Marv] (0:16 - 1:13)
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals, managed service providers, all of you techs out there that provide business support and we try to help you do that better, smarter and faster. Today is an audio show and even though the IT Business Podcast is presented by NetAlly, our audio show today is sponsored by Super Ops, the all-in-one ready-made, future ready RMM PSA tool to help you supercharge your business. Today we're going to be talking about work from home, the hybrid cloud, the hybrid workplace, all those things that has made our life such a wonderful existence since COVID.

And I have with me a new guest to the show, who I think will be a good friend to us. Chris Marks with Parallels is joining us today. Chris, how are you?

[Chris Marks] (1:15 - 1:17)
Really great, Mark. Yeah, thanks. How are you?

[Uncle Marv] (1:17 - 1:39)
I am good. Thank you for coming on the show. It was great to meet you a couple of weeks ago when we first met and I should let everybody know the first thing that we should really note is that when we think of Parallels, what Parallels is today is not what a lot of us remember Parallels of years past, correct?

[Chris Marks] (1:40 - 1:57)
Yeah, pretty true. Pretty true. Most people I talk to who know the Parallels brand are like, oh, so you're the running windows on a Mac guy?

Yep. And yes, we are. Yes.

Yes, we still do that. But there's a whole load of strings to the bow in addition to that good stuff.

[Uncle Marv] (1:57 - 2:36)
All right. So we'll get into a little bit of that because you've got some interesting little products and features. I don't know how exactly you tag them, but we'll get into that.

But I wanted to start the conversation with where you and I kind of did our pre-chat where we were talking about, you know, this work from home boom that has happened because of COVID. It's not going away. And I think you guys had a survey.

Was it your survey or somebody else's survey? They talked about something like 83% of the workforce is still going to work remote in some capacity.

[Chris Marks] (2:37 - 3:43)
Yeah. So the survey was carried out by Aluda, who is the parent company to Parallels. And that survey is available to download online.

And yeah, to be honest, there are a few surveys out there, not just ours. They're all pretty much pointing to the fact that companies who perhaps were totally unused to this hybrid model have been thrust into this hybrid world from a COVID point of view, 100% remote to a lot of organizations in this COVID model. And then when COVID, we've kind of come through the worst of it, God, hopefully we've come through the worst of it now, they're sticking with it because it actually shows that a lot of organizations are getting a lot of value from it.

Not 100%. Obviously, some organizations are mandating people go back in the office. But generally, the feel is that if organizations are able to allow their employees to do so, this choice in where people work has become more normal than it used to be.

Yeah, for sure.

[Uncle Marv] (3:43 - 4:50)
So one of the things that I've got some of my clients dealing with is they were, as you said, they were 100% in office and only a handful of people were granted the ability to work remotely. And that was just to simply grab some files, check their line of business app, and that was pretty much it. Now, people are trying to work exclusively remote and companies, I guess, are finding it difficult because during COVID, it was easy to dismiss the things you maybe couldn't do because some people, even though they went remote, they couldn't function 100% the way they did when they were in the office, whether it was printing to certain machines, scanning, access to certain parts of the network.

And now companies are trying to scramble to catch up and fix all the things that we didn't do back during COVID. Was that part of the survey that companies are now realizing that maybe they approached remote access the wrong way?

[Chris Marks] (4:51 - 6:34)
Well, it wasn't so much part of the survey, but you're absolutely right. It's definitely what customers did. And it's definitely the challenge that customers have now.

So one of the big sets of questions we're asking about the challenges they were having on all top three of the answers that came back in that survey all related to skills. Well, either skills or time or both. And to be honest, skills equals time for a lot of companies.

So they had a certain skill set, a certain level of expertise in doing things one way, and all of a sudden they've had to completely rotate into a different way of doing things, a different security posture. The attack surface from a security perspective is now way bigger than it would have been if your data was inside your office and it never left the front door. Now, obviously, you're taking into account devices that are all over the place, application access that has been granted, perhaps in an emergency scenario, like you during COVID, there were few options.

So you did what you could and you tried to make it as secure as possible, but you didn't architect for operating like that. Now, retrospectively, people are trying to either re-architect or bolt down the holes that were sometimes intentionally created, but without any option. And they're trying to now do things properly.

The challenge with that is that's so widespread that the skills available are in short supply because those kind of skill sets, those kind of guys are really busy because everyone's trying to have those conversations.

[Uncle Marv] (6:35 - 7:18)
So if we stick to the first challenge of security, I know that I had some clients, now, some of my listeners are going to laugh at me or shoot me, but I had one client that was still doing what we called naked RDP, where they were remoting into a terminal server directly through the internet with no VPN or anything like that. We were able to switch them and most of our clients, the next step available was VPN to RDP. However, we're finding that that still isn't necessarily secure enough.

Is that something that you guys are seeing as well?

[Chris Marks] (7:19 - 8:33)
Yeah, for sure. And VPN over time, there's no such thing as 100% game, right? But over time, the number of customers relying solely on a VPN as a method of security is reducing the number of customers looking at alternative, at least traditional VPNs, number of customers looking at alternative solutions from SSL VPNs through to secure access web apps or SaaS and those kinds of things is definitely changing.

I'm kind of preaching to the converted, I guess. The biggest challenge with a VPN is once you're in, you're in. It's like the front gate of a castle.

Once you have broken that gate down, you have full reign to run around the whole inside of your organization. So people are looking at multilayered security. This is obviously where Zero Trust comes in too, right?

Where you're trying to build a scenario that deals with that assumption that someone has already infiltrated your organization. How do I restrict their flow? How do I minimize the risk to my business?

[Uncle Marv] (8:35 - 9:02)
So let's take another step back and also talk about these environments. We've pretty much talked about remote access to an existing network. People most understand that as work from home where they're remoting into something, but we've now been introduced to the hybrid cloud.

And I want to get from your perspective, what is the difference between the two?

[Chris Marks] (9:03 - 12:22)
Well, they're fundamentally different from the point of view that they're working from home. We kind of consider it working from anywhere because working from home actually is still a fairly static thing because you've got a known set of resources. You're accessing a known printer because it's on my desk.

Whereas working from anywhere is the fact that I actually need to be prepared for environments and devices and form factors and monitors and different inputs to arrive that I haven't dealt with before from an IT administrator point of view. So the working from anywhere thing is really dealing with the people, allowing the people to work from a location that suits them at a time that suits them. So I might go drop the kids off at school first thing in the morning.

I then might do a whole load of work. I might then go pick those kids up from school in the afternoon and then I work through to eight, nine o'clock at night. Still getting the same amount of work done, but it's within my control.

And I might be doing some work from the car park of my kid's school while I wait for them to come out, for example. All those kind of things need to be considered from that work from anywhere kind of approach. From a hybrid cloud point of view, this is an interesting conversation because our survey, just like pretty much every survey that's out there now has people saying, well, I'm operating in a hybrid cloud environment.

The real challenge is if you really dig into it, the majority of organizations aren't actually in a hybrid cloud environment. They've got two separate environments. So most organizations who say they've got hybrid cloud have actually got their kind of legacy on-premises infrastructure and on-premises applications and those kind of things.

And they've got a new public cloud project or things operating in the public cloud, but they're not very often talking to each other. So they've actually, they're actually kind of put themselves in this position where they're now managing two infrastructures. One that's perhaps cloud native that's been orchestrated with containers or new ways of working, perhaps infrastructure as code and all those kind of great things.

Then they've got the legacy sitting behind them. And the challenge with that is that often takes more time to administrate while they're in that position. So the fact that they're in a hybrid cloud mode, a lot of organizations don't actually want to be in that hybrid cloud mode, but they find themselves where they've got little choice because of their application portfolio or requirements for data locality.

They have to keep some data on-premises contractually or legally from that kind of standpoint. But they're also trying to make use from a public cloud point of view is where they go. So it's definitely complicated.

Most business owners, if you ask them, would rather it be much more simple. They'd rather run simple as possible from one location. But we all live in a real world.

[Uncle Marv] (12:23 - 13:25)
That's right. Because I'm thinking of my own clients and yes, they've got, I work with law firms and a lot of them have legacy line of business apps that are, for lack of a better phrase, old. And some of them are not going to the cloud.

They've actually stated they will not have a cloud version. So we've got to keep on-prem servers for those particular clients. They are starting to operate in the 365 realm, where they've got obviously their email in the cloud.

Some of them are utilizing SharePoint and OneDrive. So you're right. Having data in multiple places is already easy enough just from that standpoint.

And then you're talking about any other SaaS application or cloud sharing app and stuff like that. So I know that I asked this of a lot of guests and the question to you is going to be the same to them. How do we simplify this?

[Chris Marks] (13:27 - 16:12)
Well, I guess I've got my, I've got my company hat on. So my company hat answer to this is allow them the flexibility to choose. So there's two aspects.

One, consider the normal employee. So take your kind of IT sunglasses off and considering you a normal human, they do not care where this stuff is being delivered from. They just want it to be the same tomorrow as it was today.

They want to access in the same way so they can actually do their real job. So deliver them something that's simple and consistent, no matter what the source of that data is from. And then make it easy to administrate.

So let's say I'm trying to deliver applications from a public cloud location or from multiple public cloud locations or from on-prem or all of those locations, make it as consistent as possible so that if I'm on a cloud journey, say, and 60% of my environment is still on-prem and 40% might be in a public cloud, but I'm looking to change that. As I move all of that stuff, make it consistent such that the end user doesn't need to do anything different. They don't notice.

They don't need to change what they're doing while the backend business is moving. So to try and make it as seamless as possible. Now delivering simplicity is actually quite difficult.

So delivering simplicity from a consumer point of view is relatively complicated from an architecture point of view, but that's really what we're trying to get done. So that's what an organization should look for in a partner to work with. Not deliver one single solution, because we've seen in recent months, in the last 12 months, so many software companies changing licensing models, changing business models.

And if you as a customer have invested in one company and one company alone, you are at the mercy of them changing their mind. You're at the mercy of them doing things in a way you hadn't anticipated. And if you haven't thought about plan B, you haven't thought of how an alternative, if this doesn't pan out, then almost like a prenup, right?

If you haven't considered a prenup, you have a potentially high cost of transition at that point, or you're going to have to just suck it up and pay the increased cost. So architecting for choice, architecting for simplicity.

[Uncle Marv] (16:13 - 17:55)
All right. So I'm just, I'm sorry, I'm having a flashback, because I do have one client that we went through three choices for them to do remote work. And of course they chose the cheaper option, and the cheaper option decided to raise prices.

And now they're a little upset and I'm like, it's not me, not my fault that prices were raised. And so we're going through that, looking back at options B and C again. Let me go back to part of this simplicity thing, because one of the issues that I hear other technicians having is that it is absolutely a nightmare to support end users when we don't know their hardware.

So one of the things is, it used to be preached that IT controls everything, whether it's inside the network or outside the network. We can install monitoring agents on company laptops, and that was the only device that somebody could use outside of the office. We're now in this world where anybody can use any device, personal device, laptop, to get in.

We have no idea what it is if we're just allowing that work from anywhere through a VPN proxy or they log into a portal and we don't care about the device. But it still gets hard to manage when users are complaining that, hey, this isn't working for me. I have no idea what you're connecting from.

[Chris Marks] (17:56 - 20:22)
Yeah. And that's been the challenge with delivering applications and data for 20 years, right? Or more.

It's always been a challenge. So there's a couple of aspects to that, is who owns the device and how much control can I gain over that device? And you're right, if it's a corporate device, it's relatively easy, because you can implement security policy such that should that laptop get left in a taxi or something equivalent, there are ways to remotely access that device and deal with the data, or at least encrypt the hard drive so you've got some level of security and all of this kind of stuff.

If it's not a corporate device, life becomes much more complicated if you're considering delivering data to that device. Because you've either got to have buy-in from the person who owns the device, ultimately, and some mobile management solutions do take that into account, so they'll deliver at that kind of level. Or you need to deliver a solution where everything is abstracted, so there's no actual data on that device.

And it doesn't get easier with organizations using things like SaaS, because it's sometimes difficult for kind of non-IT people to get their head around it, but moving from an application I install to a web browser doesn't often mean there's any change to the data that gets downloaded onto that client device. It's just using a web browser to do it now, whereas it used a client install to do it before. So your tab on your web browser is effectively the client, and the data is still being sent to that machine.

So an infiltrator can still access that browser tab, just like they could access the data coming into the client. So it's difficult. Obviously, one of the ways of, well, I say obviously, how a lot of organizations have dealt with this challenge is to complete the abstract, everything out, deliver through, let's say, a HTML5 browser window, an application that isn't really there.

You can just see the images of the application. And you mentioned RDS a little while ago, and obviously there are a lot of vendors in that space, including us, delivering virtualized applications. And that works particularly well in high security environments or contractors accessing apps and that kind of stuff.

[Uncle Marv] (20:25 - 21:01)
Yeah, and I get what you mean with RDS. You can either publish a desktop or you can publish apps, and that is a different experience based on the user and stuff going to a portal. Yeah, that's fun.

Let me ask, and yes, obviously you have your company hat on from Parallels, but do you see anything changing on the horizon as to how we do this, not just from a Parallels standpoint, but in general in the industry? How do you see the future going for us?

[Chris Marks] (21:04 - 22:49)
It seems as if what there has been a growth in recently is solutions which enable you to deploy apps in different ways, depending on the user's context. So, for example, if I am at my laptop at home and I log in, I am able to launch applications that might be locally installed on my company laptop. But if I log in again and I'm on a network that's not recognized by my company, it doesn't launch those local resources.

It instead launches a virtual application. And again, this is trying to get to the point where the user doesn't dictate what happens. I can still dictate that from an IT security point of view, but they also don't care what happens because to them it kind of looks the same or it looks as similar as possible, but you're dealing with the fact I'm now on an unsecure network.

So I'm not going to send you any data. I'm going to drag you into the data center or into the cloud and the data is going to stay there. I'm going to give you that stuff.

So there has been a growth in those types of solutions where you're trying to accept the fact that a lot of organizations are going to need to consume applications in different ways and sometimes consume applications in different ways, depending on where that human is at any moment in time, rather than what has been the case. And it's still the case with a lot of software organizations. They're trying to shoehorn 100% of the users into consuming applications and data in one way, in one method, which is very unusual that an organization is going to fit every one of their users into that one use case.

[Uncle Marv] (22:51 - 23:14)
So from what I hear you saying, and I'm trying to understand every aspect of my head, we're talking about the ability to either publish an application or publish a virtual instance or snippets of that. That doesn't sound like a VDI infrastructure that I've heard everybody talking about in recent years, or does it?

[Chris Marks] (23:15 - 23:59)
Yes. Well, VDI would be part of it. So VDI is just one of the choices.

So the path forward is seeing a way to consider the user context and then decide how I'm going to deliver the applications. Delivering them via VDI absolutely is going to be one of those choices, or going back to our opening statements, delivering to a user who has a MacBook, but who wants to run a Windows application locally, well, we've got a solution for that as well. But we can then make a decision in the future about how that application is and when, under what circumstance.

[Uncle Marv] (24:00 - 24:56)
Interesting. All right. Well, so I'm sitting here looking at the clock and realizing that I asked you a ton of questions about working remotely without getting into you and your company.

And I want to go ahead and do a little bit of that now, but I'm wondering, I think we've got a lot of content that can happen around Parallels and what you guys have done recently. Would you be willing to do a second show with me and split that up? Okay, great.

So let me, I didn't do a full introduction of you at the beginning. I did say that you are with Parallels, the company that we all remember as running Windows on a Mac. Your position is the principal outbound product manager.

Yes. So let me ask, why outbound product manager?

[Chris Marks] (24:57 - 25:04)
Yeah, well, it's probably a job title you may not have heard of because until I had it, I hadn't heard of it either.

[Uncle Marv] (25:05 - 25:05)
Okay.

[Chris Marks] (25:06 - 26:56)
So what, I guess a lot of people listening may have heard of a field CTO, which is like a senior kind of pre-sales type role. An outbound product manager is kind of similar to that, but rather than being connected to sales, rather than it being a pre-sales role and ultimately having some kind of target in order to sell more business, our role is connected directly to product management. So when we're having conversations with customers, partners, we are tasked with, and this is what the outbound piece is, of getting some genuine feedback.

We actually want to make our stuff better. So getting some genuine feedback about what they're finding good, what they're finding bad, what features could be improved, what features could be added. I went all Dr. Seuss then, didn't I?

So now we feed that back directly into product management so that those become feature requests and all those kinds of things. And also what we do is from an outbound point of view, we're kind of the voice of that product management stuff. So we talk about things that are new, things that perhaps haven't quite been developed yet, but we've got some ideas and we'll talk to some trusted customers and some trusted partners about their opinions on the direction of travel, those kinds of things.

So we gather all that information in and feed that into product management. There are compatriots of mine who are inbound product managers. So we're like two halves of one coin.

So we do the outbound conversation and the inbound guys do the actual real product management stuff who are scheduling when it's going to happen, scheduling when that's going to be deployed.

[Uncle Marv] (26:57 - 27:11)
All right. And you've actually been with Parallels for a while. I was trying to do some research on you and I thought when I saw your other experience, I thought you were just new to Parallels, but you've been there a bit.

[Chris Marks] (27:12 - 27:25)
Well, I've been at Parallels a couple of years. I was 14 years working for a reseller and I've been working with a couple of other vendors as well. But yeah, I've been at Parallels for a couple of years.

[Uncle Marv] (27:26 - 27:44)
All right. Had you always dealt in this kind of, I don't want to say virtual space, that's not it, but I guess this virtualization world with the cloud and remote access and that sort of thing?

[Chris Marks] (27:45 - 27:58)
Yeah. So originally back in the day, I was an applications guy. I used to be an applications trainer.

I then moved into the amazing world of Lotus Notes. Anyone out there still remembers that? Lotus Notes.

Wow.

[Uncle Marv] (27:58 - 27:58)
Yeah.

[Chris Marks] (27:59 - 28:23)
And then just as Lotus Notes was tailing off, let's put it subtly. So just as the Lotus Notes was tailing off, this new thing came around called Citrix and that was back in the late 90s. And I got on that wagon and have been involved in end user computing, application virtualization since the late 90s.

[Uncle Marv] (28:23 - 28:45)
All right. So you brought up Citrix. So I'll ask this question.

I know we didn't prep for it, but Citrix of course has been seen as the big gorilla in this space. Parallels at one time was thought to be a very big competitor. Did you guys buy a product called 2x?

[Chris Marks] (28:47 - 29:07)
Yeah. So Parallels, the Windows on the Mac guys bought 2x. So 2x was the start of the voyage into VDI as it was back then.

And that is where that competitive angle from a Citrix point of view started. Yeah.

[Uncle Marv] (29:08 - 29:33)
Okay. All right. I wanted to get a little bit of pretext to what we'll be talking about next.

Before we end this part of the show, why don't you tell everybody a prelude to what we'll talk about later? Like I said, Parallels, most of us remember as just simply that software that allowed Windows to run on Mac and then we could do whatever. What is Parallels today?

[Chris Marks] (29:35 - 30:51)
So Parallels as a company is fundamentally about choice. I've probably said the word choice too many times already, but that's really what we're about. So we act differently to the majority of software companies out there.

So most software companies are going to tell a customer this is the waay it is. This is the way that they should be working and this is the platform they should be running on. Parallels works in a completely different way.

We're designed to meet the customer on their journey. So it's a more consultative experience. We have a number of solutions that could either on their own meet a customer's requirements or combined could meet multiple use cases with that customer.

But ultimately, we're about delivering some of the stuff I mentioned before, simplicity to the consumer at the front end, the normal human, simplicity, the administrator, taking on board the fact that the likelihood is everyone's living this hybrid world, whether it's a hybrid workplace and I'm moving all over the place or whether it's hybrid cloud and I need to run different things from different places. We're trying to simplify that and deliver one way of doing it no matter where we are.

[Uncle Marv] (30:51 - 31:07)
All right. Well, that sounds like a great summary and this feels like a great breaking point for us to end this show and then plan for part two. Chris, thank you very much for doing this and we'll look forward to the second part.

[Chris Marks] (31:08 - 31:08)
Great to talk to you, Mark.

[Uncle Marv] (31:09 - 31:33)
All right, folks, that's going to do it for this episode. And sorry that we cut this one kind of short. I don't like running long when we do the audio shows.

So I'll have Chris Marks back and we'll finish up with part two and we'll get more into parallels. Not your daddy's software anymore. So that's going to do it for this episode.

We'll see you soon. And until next time, holla!