Rimo3 is a cloud-based SaaS solution and it’s really built for scale and automation around app modernization and management, so if you are looking to move all your apps because you’re changing the platform you’re delivering desktops on, maybe you’re moving from Citrix or upgrading Citrix. Maybe you’re looking to adopt Azure Virtual Desktop, or even now today I think, or a couple of days back it went GA, which is the Windows 365 solution from Microsoft around the cloud desktop.
TIMESTAMP
00:07 Introduction
00:31 The Brew
01:45 What is Rimo3 and what’s it about?
03:43 Is Rimo3 an add-on?
08:26 Mitigating Cyber Security
10:54 Conclusion
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Robert Buktenica: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Late Night Brew, where we talk the brews first, and then we get around to the business at some point. I’m Robert Buktenica, and with me on the show tonight, if I could form a coherent sentence, is Peter Cooney to discuss Rimo3 and what all the buzz is about. Pete, welcome and thanks for joining me.
Peter Cooney: Thanks Buck, great to be here, mate.
The Brew
Robert: Thank you, so I know tonight is a misnomer because you’re morning, but what brew are you having with me?
Peter: Well, if you know anything about me I actually love tea, and I’m not a coffee drinker, I’m a tea drinker. I have today, I’ll show you the box because it’s not much to see in a mug of tea, but this is a French Earl Gray by T2. T2’s a tea company here that makes all sorts of awesome, awesome teas. So I have myself a delicious cup of black French Earl Grey
Robert: Sounds delicious. I love a good Earl Grey, so I might have to see if they sell in the US.
Peter: Mate, if they don’t, I’ll ship you some.
Robert: I’ll hold you to that.
Peter: Yes, I’ll do it.
Robert: Tonight I’ve got Purple Haze, Abita, it’s a New Orleans brewery, Louisiana. Raspberry. It’s really good. Usually fruited beers tend to be too sweet. This one happens to sit that line nicely of an enjoyable wheat fruit but not cloying, not syrupy that kind of experience. Let’s start.
Peter: Yes, man.
What is Rimo3 and what’s it about?
Robert Buktenica: Let’s start, Rimo3. There’s been a lot of buzz, at least at the time of the recording about Rimo3, so what is Rimo3 and what’s it about?
Peter: Well, look, it is a good question. Rimo3 is a cloud-based SaaS solution and it’s really built for scale and automation around app modernisation and management, so if you are looking to move all your apps because you’re changing the platform you’re delivering desktops on, maybe you’re moving from Citrix or upgrading Citrix. Maybe you’re looking to adopt Azure Virtual Desktop, or even now today I think, or a couple of days back it went GA, which is the Windows 365 solution from Microsoft around the cloud desktop.
You can use it for that and what it’ll do there is it’ll assess your feed at your applications. It’ll assess them all for that suitability, and not just will it run. It does an intelligent smoke test. It gives you a performance output report. How much CPU, how much RAM. You can baseline it against where you are today versus where you want to go tomorrow and compare those two platforms, and then it’ll also convert these applications automatically to the modern MSIX format. What that’ll allow you to do is do something called app attach which is pretty crucial for virtual desktop environments where you can layer apps, so pretty interestingly that what you’ll be given at the end is a very thin gold image, very much in line with the Windows is a service model that Microsoft’s promoting and then you layer your apps on top.
They actually attach to the user session at log on and they just store it on simple storage. What you have is a very small, lightweight gold image, and you don’t have to unpack that image and update the apps and repackage it and push it to a pool and drain the pool and start a new one just to update an app and your image, you can just layer the app on. The benefit of Rimo is not just that assessment and I guess that migration, it’s the modernisation of the application fleet.
Is Rimo3 an add-on?
Robert: Interesting. I’m trying to think of the best way to ask this, is it an add-on– It sounds like to me it’s an add-on to Citrix AVD where it’s running in parallel and creating or attaching that app package, or is it creating a thin enough app that it can just attach on the side natively within that platform?
Peter: Yes. It sits outside those platforms. You can target Rimo against your environment. If you have a VMware instance or a Citrix pool, you want to target- even a physical machine, you essentially put an agent on that machine and you tell Rimo, go and execute these tasks against it, go and install this app, run it, give me the telemetry and give me all the data back and I’ll do some smarts, around the analysis of that.
The beauty is, if you think about it that way, you think, well, I can do physicals as well, and because it’s measuring my apps and it’s measuring how they interact with the environment and measuring also, I guess their compatibility, if you like, then you can use it not only for that migration scenario I gave you, right? You can use it for environmental change. You could actually do your whole application portfolio. What does it look like if I upgrade to the latest version of Windows 10, or Windows 11? This isn’t a discussion around app compatibility because we generally have that. It’s more than that.
It’s actually the compatibility of your entire environment, the platform you’re choosing, the hosting, how it’s hosted, the hardware behind it. It’s not just, will the app run on the OS? That’s probably likely. We know application compatibility rates are high. It’s more environmental, to see what it runs like. I’ll give you an example. Exploring Rimo with a customer, they said, “Look, we’re going to move from Symantec to CrowdStrike as an AV provider,” and what they said was, “Look, we can use Rimo3 to go run all my apps as a baseline against my current setup, which is Symantec AV. I’m going to install CrowdStrike on one of these machines that Rimo3 targets.
Then I’m going to run all my apps again and see if there’s actually a performance difference.” You could make it an informed decision before swapping your AV vendor, knowing the impact it’ll have on your desktops, so you could run that against different types of hardware, different types of environments and actually get an understanding of that.
Robert: It’s really an app delivery solution that gets optimized to DDIs or physicals or what the environment’s requiring?
Peter: Yes. It doesn’t deliver the apps but what it’ll do is run those apps through a test, but it’s real-world because it’s doing it in your environment. The beauty of it is that you could run these tests as many times as you need. You could run them when there’s a monthly patch, you could run them when you’ve got that OS update, you could run them if you’re maybe modernising your apps into Intune and seeing ,will these packages be converted and can they be converted into that modern MSIX format, which has lots and lots of benefits which hopefully we might cover in another Late Night Brew but there’s a lot of things it can do and a lot of use cases where it can save you a lot of time and money.
It’s about shortening and getting a rapid assessment. If you’ve ever done app packaging and- it’s quite a long process if you got lots of apps. As I said at the start, Rimo3 is built for scale. If you have lots and lots of apps, you need to package them in MSIX format. It’s generally quite serial because it’s quite labour driven and you can do one and then the next one and the next one, or you could imagine if you targeted Rimo at lots of workstations and lots of machines and said, “Run these tasks,” that it can go and execute and do these and it’s going to run 24/7.
Robert: Oh, okay. It’s working when you are not, and that’s filled a lot of that time back.
Peter: The computer never sleeps, I guess.
Robert: Well that gets into the philosophical of, do they dream, but that’s not what this is about.
Peter: Probably will one day, mate. I was reading an article the other day about the code writing itself. It’s certainly getting there at a fast pace.
Mitigating Cyber Security
Robert: Absolutely, it really is, but that will be a good future episode of talking about where AI and machine learning is going. With the time we have left, if you’ve got a good or interesting challenge or use case that Rimo3 has come across that’s worth a mention.
Peter: Yes, look, I think it’s probably around that environmental change, right? If we look at Australia, we’ve got an Australian Cyber Security Center which is run by the government, and they have published something called the Essential Eight. It’s eight great steps for mitigating cybersecurity incidents, and number two on that is patching your machines or patching your environment. A lot of people do patch, but they patch late. They don’t necessarily patch on time or if they do patch, they might be hesitant and the reason they’re delaying is that they don’t understand or can’t quantify the impact, so they will sometimes deploy to a pilot group and go, did it change? Does it feel different?
It’s quite anecdotal, so if you used Rimo3 to patch a machine, chuck all your apps at it, see the performance profile, and actually have an understanding of how that interacts with that new environment or that new change, that patched OS, that update you’ll have a great comfortability to deploy and you actually hand on heart, know that it’ll work. Now in some environments, these actually have to be certified. If you make a change to a machine that’s involved in medical supply, vaccine development, you’ve got to certify that machine is true and accurate. That’s something you can do with Rimo3.
That guidance from the Australian Cyber Security Center is actually that you patch within 48 hours of a known exploit and a known patch that remediates that. You can imagine with lots of apps in a big environment and complexity, that’s quite a hard turnaround, but with Rimo3 you could pretty much go, right, here’s the machine that’s patched. Run through that routine of all the apps that are important and test against those, it’s come back, it said everything is fine. The performance is the same and the apps still operate through its intelligent smoke test, and you’re good to go. Nobody has to do anything. You simply patch that machine and tell it to run that task sequence. It’s pretty cool in that respect, really leveraging the power of automation machine learning to drive that out.
Conclusion
Robert: Absolutely. Unfortunately, that does wrap up our time today for the show. I hope that everyone has enjoyed delicious drink. Thank you again Peter for enlightening us to Rimo3.
Peter: Thanks for having me, Buck.
Robert: Well, if anyone has any questions or feedback, please get in touch. Everything is below. If you got an idea for an episode, we’d love to hear it. Until next time, have a great day or night. Cheers, mate.
