Onboarding Contractors: VDI Was Drastically Delaying Productivity. That’s When Venn Stepped in.

A leading smart-home HVAC manufacturer with thousands of contractors in the field needed a way to enable their users to be as productive as possible – as quickly as possible. They also needed a way to ensure their contractor workforce wasn’t exposing the business to unnecessary risk. A virtual desktop was selected many years ago, but quickly started to show its age. 

Every day, users logged in from personal laptops to access the company’s legacy ERP system – an application central to building, configuring, and shipping climate-tech products to customers nationwide. With their VDI, they were quickly faced with delayed log-in, lag, and latency issues.

The challenge: optimizing their remote work computer model to get users onboarded faster and provide a better user experience; all while keeping corporate data secure.

The Challenge: Securing Access for a Distributed Workforce Without Creating Friction

The company needed contractors to use their own laptops, since it was operationally necessary and far more efficient than shipping hardware. But unmanaged devices introduced real risk:

• A compromised laptop could spread malware into production systems.
• Sensitive files could end up stored on the personal side.
• Legacy ERP tools required full desktop functionality – not something browsers could handle.

These were the use cases their legacy VDI was selected to solve.

Venn’s Blue Border™: Making Secure Remote Access and Secure BYOD Simple

When the company met with Venn, the conversation shifted from trying to tame BYOD to embracing it with real guardrails. As CTO Dvir Shapira puts it, Venn was designed to “put a fence around the Wild West of BYOD so contractors can work freely, without putting the business in harm’s way.”

During the evaluation process, IT Infrastructure, operations and security leaders saw multiple demos of Venn’s Blue Border and were blown away by how simple and streamlined their processes could be.

To onboard a new contractor, IT Operations would provide the Venn agent for download, the contractor would put it on their laptop, log in, download their necessary applications (locally), and be able to work on applications inside Blue Border™ with full DLP, security and compliance controls in effect. And ONLY their work apps. There was zero impact to activity on the personal side of the machine

Inside Blue Border™, contractors could finally get frictionless access to the ERP tools they relied on, while the business regained control over how work happened. 

Key Venn Benefits

• Network-level protection
  • Venn’s split-tunnel VPN ensured that network access to all Blue Border™ applications tied into the customer’s existing ZTNA solution. No matter where the user logged in from, work assets were always isolated and protected.
• Granular contractor permissions
  • The company now enforces precise policies like antivirus checks on the device prior to granting access, blocked copy/paste, restricted file actions, and controlled clipboard behavior – all configured per user or contractor group.
• Secure file storage
  • All work files stay isolated inside Blue Border, never touching the personal side of the device. Sensitive data remains invisible, inaccessible, and protected at all times.
• Fits their application stack
  • Legacy ERP and all work apps (browser-based and locally installed.) Everything runs inside Venn; no heavy change management required.
• Simple, scalable deployment
  • No backend servers, no remote hosting through VDI, no complex buildouts. The company rolled out Venn to hundreds of contractors in a single week.
• Protection even when the personal device is compromised
  • If malware exists on the device, it stays contained and isolated from Blue Border applications. 

The Result

Today, the organization runs its massive contractor workforce with far more confidence and far less overhead. Contractors work freely from their own laptops, while business data and systems stay protected.

VDI’s gone. Operational drag is gone.

And the occasional malware-happy contractor? Locked out before trouble starts.

With Venn, the company finally secured its BYOD frontier, without slowing down its people or its products.

See what other customers are saying about Venn’s Blue Border…

Ready to see Blue Border for yourself? Book a demo HERE.