Surely IGEL OS is only useful on the LAN?

That’s what I thought too. When I had my initial chat with the team at IGEL, my though process was very much that IGEL wasn’t relevant due to the pandemic. That’s a Thin Client OS, right? Turns out I was wrong (very rarely happens).

In fact, IGEL had one of its best years ever when everyone was locked up at home.

Why?

IGEL started moving away from hardware several years ago, and is now firmly in the edge OS camp. And an edge OS is pretty rubbish if it can’t be deployed at, well, the edge.

One of the core components of the IGEL platform is the Universal Management Suite, or UMS. It provides all of the device registration, configuration and management tasks for the edge devices. In a LAN environment, devices running IGEL OS will just connect directly to the DNS name of the UMS server(s) or the load balancer. When a device is external however, that’s gets a lot more difficult, and you definitely don’t want to expose a management tool like UMS directly to the internet.

The IGEL platform includes a capability known as the IGEL Cloud Gateway, or ICG. It’s this little box of magic that allows devices outside of the corporate LAN to still be managed by UMS.

This is a great way of extending the secure OS or bubble of an enterprise anywhere the user is, rather than tying them to a location, or forcing them to use a VPN.

Here’s a quick video I put together to show what this looks like: