IGEL might be the most interesting business continuity technology you haven’t considered yet.
When isolation protocols activate, endpoint access for the people who need it most becomes an immediate problem. Your IR team. Your senior leadership. Your recovery coordinators. Most BC/DR plans recognize it; very few solve it elegantly.
That gap is what drew my attention at IGEL‘s Now & Next 2026 — here are my takeaways.
When an organization is mid-incident, one of the first steps is often invoking isolation protocols, which causes one of your first problems: endpoint access for those that need it. Your IR team needs clean connectivity. Your senior leadership needs secure communication. Your recovery coordinators need to operate without introducing additional risk into an already compromised environment. Most BC/DR plans recognize this problem; very few solve it elegantly.
That’s the gap IGEL is stepping into.
If you know IGEL at all, you know them for VDI thin clients, Citrix and VMware relationships, or purpose-built devices in healthcare and manufacturing. You could summarize that chapter (which continues today) as the evolution from “here is a better endpoint” to “we make your endpoints better through hardening, standardization, and ease of management.” Somewhere along the way, their strategists recognized that a secure endpoint not underpinned by mainstream OS’s could radically reduce the attack surface and unlock new remediation capabilities — and that recognition is now pointing directly at BC/DR.
At its Now & Next 2026 conference, IGEL made 23 announcements; my favorite was IGEL Business Continuity Emergency Mode.
As someone who has spent three decades protecting and recovering servers (while often disregarding endpoints due to the sheer complexity of supporting such a divergent set of platforms), I’ll admit I came in skeptical – and then I saw it in action.
Here are two conversation starters worth taking back to your teams:
If you’re an enterprise with any existing VDI infrastructure, there is a conversation waiting to happen between your BC/DR stakeholders, your cyber resilience team, and your endpoint management group. Endpoints with a secure OS should be part of your isolation and remediation strategy; most plans don’t address this explicitly, and that’s a gap worth closing before your next incident.
If you’re an MSP offering DRaaS, the combination of IGEL BC Emergency Mode and their pocket USB option could be a meaningful differentiator: secured endpoint connectivity directly into your clean room or DR site, as part of the service you’re already delivering.
Either way, the framing is simple: run Windows on the good days; run IGEL on the bad days.
There is more to a conference than technology
If you attend enough of them, you learn to read the room. Handshakes versus bro-hugs in the expo hall. Islands versus group conversations in the common areas. People killing time versus people genuinely engaged in the extras. The difference between a vendor event and a community is visible if you know what to look for.
I’ve watched a lot of ecosystems over the years. I used to call one of the most special and impactful the ‘green army — not just users, but passionate advocates supporting each other in forums, user groups, and even pre-sales conversations. That kind of community forms at the intersection of genuinely innovative technology and a cohort of practitioners who recognize that their organizations and their careers are better because of it.
It will be interesting to see if IGEL’s community further galvanizes and expands as more IT resilience leaders discover what it can do on the bad days.
Closing thoughts on an era after Windows?
Are we done with autonomous endpoints? That may be more of a cultural question than a technical one.
We used to say don’t run servers as virtual machines, but we were willing to fail over to VMs for DR. After we did, some recognized that servers run just fine in VMs and never went back; resilience accelerated adoption.
We used to say don’t run mission-critical workloads in the cloud, but a cloud DR site was acceptable. Then we discovered those workloads run pretty well up there; some didn’t go back and others migrated because they proved it to themselves.
Some will say they’re not ready for endpoints that aren’t Windows, but they’re open to switching during a crisis. Some of those will discover their users operate just fine in a secure OS; and some of those won’t go back either.
We’ll see.
If you’re evaluating where endpoints fit within your resilience strategies or building DRaaS offerings and want to compare notes, I’d welcome the conversation.
Jason Buffington .com 
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