Windows to Go

padgett

Windows to Go is a very powerful tool that is not well understood. For years I have travelled with one laptop and multiple drives, one for work and one for personal use. Often at a conference I would leave the laptop in a hotel room and just carry the drives in a coat pocket.

 

However due to the nature of Windows since Win2000/ME the drives were only usable in that one laptop, in any other computer, even the same make and model, they would bluescreen. This meant that for forensic/recovery work, you needed either Linux or to mount the drive as a slave.

 

Windows to Go changes that and is an enormous enabler of BYOD. You can have a personal device that can now be used for business/enterprise/agency use with a completely different set of policies and protections just by providing a thumb drive. When removed it becomes the personal device again. Both contexts are insulated from each other through full disk encryption and "never the twain will meet".

 

Here "thumb drive" is a bit of a misnomer since it can be anything from a special flash drive (e.g. Kingston "Workspace") to a 120GB SSD the size of a pack of playing cards.

 

The DoD bought in to the tune of over U$600M in December and the NSA issued an instruction sheet.

http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/Windows_To_Go.pdf

 

Add in the first Windows device that can fit in a pocket (may strain the seams a bit though) and an entirely new Vista of portability opens up.

 

Quite a diffence since my first 32lb "portable PC".

Philman

Thanks.

But remember: WtG works only on Entreprise version and only 5 kind of USB Drive can be used. Hope it will change in the future...

padgett

Actually not quite:

1) WTG must be generated on a Enterprise box (now) but then can be used on any device after that (W8E is available on MSDN). Suspect is more of a volume licensing thing.

 

2) Officially WTG requires a "Workspace" flash drive and requires USB 3.0. I have WTG running on a 32GB Kingston Workspace, 64GB Adata USB 3.0 flash drive, 149GB SATA disk, and a  120GB Shadow SSD. A 32GB Flash or SD card does not have enough free space. Runs fine on USB 2.0 but takes a bit longer (still under 45 seconds) to boot. Once I get a real 64GB microSD I plan to try that also.

 

I am a little limited in test equipment since this is a hobby and not a profit center but did give a PowerPoint presentation in the office with the W3 today. Had this little bag with everthing including the keyboard in an eyeglass case & HDMI>VGA adapter for the projector and went off with out a hitch. Laser-pointer in keyboard was a neat addition.