The decline and fall of the corporate desktop

Tag : Lace Doily

I have rarely met anyone who has a good word to say about that iconof the computer age, that soulless automaton of despair, thecorporate desktop. Apart from, of course, the computermanufacturers who have profited immensely by pandering to thatdeep-seated desire of enterprises to regiment, control and containtheir workforce in the name of security.
OK, so it’s a poor attempt at melodrama, but it seems to methat the thinking that has for many years propped up the corporatePC infrastructure is starting to unravel, and things could finallybe starting to get interesting for people at both ends of theEthernet cable.
A couple of things prompted me to start thinking about this. Onewas a definition I trawled from Google while trying to work outwhat on earth “rightshoring” means. The resultwasn’t pretty: “Rightshoring is a mixture ofoffshoring, outsourcing, nearshoring, two-shoring, global sourcing,insourcing and multi-sourcing.”
I’m sorry I asked. I don’t know much about any of thesemultitudinous “-ings”, but I do know the effectthey’ve had on at least one multinational company. Officesfull of people who perhaps once worked together are now split up,with some roles taken by staff, others by contractors, and witheach trying to make sense of their own company’s reportingstructures that were seemingly created by someone tossing a lacedoily over a globe.
Even if my poorly researched definition is only half right, a“rightshored” company is going to have a tough timedeciding exactly what a standard corporate desktop even means,especially if the outsourcing contractors are made up of companiesthat are actually bigger than they are.
The other, more concrete, prompt to my musings was at a recentevent where I was chatting to the global security chief of anotherlarge multinational. I happened to mention corporate desktops andhe launched into a passionate explanation of why he considered themdoomed as a species.
It turns out that after years of trying to nail down PCs andlaptops as “trusted devices” so that they’relittle more than dumb terminals, and creating an entire generationof miserable PC users into the bargain, all devices connected tothe network these days are viewed as potentially evil andmalicious. End-point lockdown is the technical term, I believe.This has been around for ages, but when fully implemented insoftware, it is usually enough to bring most PCs to their knees.
In this scenario, products such as Yoggie’s USB or Express Card security dongles , which contain their own processor, memory, hardened Linux OS andall the requisite security paraphernalia, can come into their ownby offloading the grunt work from the PC.
Working out elaborate group policies ­ and going insane tryingto deal with the exceptions ­ doesn’t really matter toomuch, as any potential threat can be nullified before it even getsonto the network. This is all in theory, of course.
But once that step has been taken, the reasoning behindstandardised hardware and software builds gently evaporates, andthis happens even quicker if you are brave enough to trust yournon-critical applications to the “cloud”. Indeed, mycontact reckoned the best part of this approach was that businessunits would be free to buy their own kit, based on localavailability and what their users actually need, rather than havinga standard corporate desktop from a single supplier imposed onthem.
And to me, that sounds like a rare example of genuine technologicalprogress.