Bring your own PC Anywhere with Windows To Go or Hopedot VOS Encrypted USB Drive

What’s Windows To Go? Some of my readers may ask. It’s an enterprise feature of Windows 8 that enables the creation of a Windows To Go workspace that can be booted from a USB-connected external drive on PCs that meet the Windows 7 or Windows 8 certification requirements, regardless of the operating system running on the PC. At the very beginning, Microsoft named this feature as “Portable Workspace”. To put it simply, it allows enterprises to provision a full corporate environment people can boot and run from on multiple computers on a USB drive. "Users want to work from different places -- on an airplane, at the coffee shop -- and they want to work from more than one device," said Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows To Go.

The notion of Windows booting from a USB sounds familiar when I firstly heard about Windows To Go. As a virtualization technology enthusiast, I have mentioned in my previous articles that softwares like Prayaya V3 and Hopedot VOS can be a very easy-to-mange portable workspace creator as well. An obvious resemblance between them is that you can take Windows home with you from work only with a tiny USB drive rather than a heavy laptop. But it’s Windows 8 this time. I have to admit that I am really looking forward to its final release in October.

What we are talking here is not portable applications or something like that. It is about carrying the whole PC environment on a USB to any accessible PC or laptops. If you want to experiment with Windows To Go but do not want to order a new certified USB drive, you can create your own Windows To Go USB drive. Get ready a 32 GB or larger USB 3.0 drive (it can also be an external hard drive) and build the USB drive on at a Windows 7 or 8 PC. Another thing you need is Windows 8 DVD ISO and Windows 8 Developer Preview Product Key. The process is a little complicated in my view. 

What if you are using Windows 7, XP, Vista or older systems and you don’t have a 32GB 3.0 USB drive? Hopedot VOS will be a good choice for you to experiment how you can bring your corporate PC to your home PC. It only requires a fast speed USB (or external hard drive) and a PC using Windows 32 bits system. The installation of Hopedot VOS is as easy as any other standard softwares and takes less than 2 minutes.

It’s no doubt that Windows To Go will bring great convenience for enterprises to improve employees’ productivity, to save on capital expenditures and to apply IT management for data security and disaster recovery etc. But still there are some shortcomings different from a traditional Windows installed on a local PC. As to where you are supposed to store documents, the solution is to save data in the cloud, more specifically Microsoft’s own SkyDrive, that is, you should have a Microsoft Account. I should say it’s not what I expect at this point. Both Prayaya V3 and Hopedot VOS can save data within the virtual environment and be taken to any PC without problem. Let’s take Hopedot VOS Security Edition for example. You only need to create a safe partition when you install Hopedot VOS on a USB drive. And then all the applications and data will be automatically encrypted into this safe partition and immediately accessible after the USB is plugged into the PC.

Since the workspace is roaming from one PC to another laptop on a USB drive, the security issue matters a lot. Therefore, Windows To Go makes a sacrifice that the user’s local hard disk is inaccessible from the Windows TO GO environment, which guarantees that the Windows To Go workspace doesn’t get infected by any downloaded malware. Similarly, Hopedot VOS Security Edition also completely annihilates the access to the local hard drive to isolate the VOS virtual environment from the host PC. If users want to transfer data between the VOS system and the host Windows OS, the data must be imported or exported with pre-set data management password.

On the whole, Windows To Go and softwares like Hopedot VOS will definitely make our life easier to some extent. I will keep following up with their new moves.