IGEL and Lenovo – A partnership that goes beyond hardware!

As an ever-increasing number of organisations enable their users to work remotely, the burden, demand and pressure on IT is on the rise. 

How can companies ensure their users are accessing data securely? That the devices and deployed services they are using are built with both physical, OS and below OS security in mind, and ensure an optimum user experience?  That all purchases are as future-proof as possible, not only supporting today’s workflows but ones that are yet to be conceived. This would be a difficult task in a stable economic market, yet alone in today’s treacherous market. We are currently witnessing shrinking/dwindling budgets, a severe knowledge/skill gap in the security sector, and an ever-increasing number of ransomware and malware attacks. In the race to see which security vendor can shout the loudest and take market share, it can be difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. 

Throughout my career working with customers of all shapes and sizes, I have always led with one key message: “choose the right device for the user persona and invest in workflow optimisation”, words that I believe can be directly attributed to the IGEL and Lenovo partnership. 

IGEL are renowned for their ability to simplify end point OS management and their ability to reduce 3rd party security costs with their highly secure read-only Linux OS designed for VDI, SaaS and DaaS. Additionally, their ability to help future-proof customers’ Cloud/VDI strategies by building strong relationships with all the key players in this space (Citrix, Omnissa, Microsoft, to name a few).  

IGEL is doing all of this whilst also helping to reduce Operational Management costs and extending the lifecycle of both existing and new EUC devices.  

Now add Lenovo, the number one PC brand globally, into this equation and customers and partners alike can start to build out a low cost, highly secure end point strategy for Now and Next. 

Lenovo is committed to their partnership with IGEL as the leading IGEL Ready Partner with the largest range of IGEL OS Certified products. Lenovo’s investment involves becoming the only IGEL OEM Partner in the market, enabling us to supply devices preloaded AND pre-licensed with IGEL OS from factory. However, we are gearing up to take this partnership to the next level.  

Lenovo and IGEL are working on some exciting developments which will enable customers to enhance their EUC device security posture by simplifying BIOS management, including BIOS password management, BIOS updates and firmware updates via IGEL OS 12 Apps. This approach will enable IT to deploy new BIOS and firmware updates as soon as they are made public, helping to close potential security “back doors” faster.  Lenovo and IGEL are also working on incorporating a number of solutions within Lenovo’s industry leading “ThinkShield” security portfolio, starting with ThinkShield Hardware Defence, an AI enabled EUC Device peripheral detection/management solution which significantly increases physical device security at the edge. 

Outside of these exciting security enhancements, Lenovo are also enabling IGEL’s OS to take full advantage of the latest and greatest hardware features in our devices, including, but not limited to NPU’s (Neural Processing Units). 

NPU’s are designed to help drive the adoption of AI-PC use cases, from productivity and security enhancements, to advanced Cloud-AI workflow offloading, redirecting the processing of the AI workflows from the VDI/DaaS/Cloud infrastructure to the local device, all the way through to running LLM’s (Large Language Models) locally on an IGEL enabled end point…AI-PC’s are no longer limited to Windows OS based devices. 

In summary, partnering with IGEL and Lenovo will not only enable IT to “do more with less”, but the partnership of these two EUC giants will help strengthen IT security posture at the edge with minimal to zero investment in additional 3rd party end point device security tools. This partnership will enable IT to gain greater visibility and control over of their end point estate, and in addition, helps businesses ensure that all investment in new EUC hardware devices is not only suitable for their current workflows, but also for their future ones!