Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access: Run sensitive activities in an isolated workspace

An overview of Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access, which provides a secure environment for accessing sensitive data and services.

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Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee has been in the IT industry 15+ years and focuses on networking and virtualization. He contributes to the community through various blog posts and technical documentation primarily at Virtualizationhowto.com.

What is Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access?

I reviewed the Hysolate Free offering that allows isolating risky end user activities in a virtual machine. The Hysolate Free offering works like a sandbox that enables you to isolate risky activities from your host machine. However, in reviewing the market trends and user feedback, Hysolate realized that it was providing a way to isolate risky activities but not isolate and protect sensitive activities.

For users who wanted to achieve the opposite of what Hysolate Free offered, protecting sensitive activities in an isolated workspace, Hysolate Free did not solve their use case. Now, with Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access, Hysolate provides a solution that isolates access to sensitive websites, documents, and apps from within a sensitive-access virtual machine running locally.

If you think that you can do much of the same thing in a VMware or Hyper-V VM running locally, you can accomplish much of the same separation. However, the power of the Hysolate solution is the security automation it provides, which makes the solution seamless and easy to use. One of the main reasons that an isolated local VM environment fails to be used effectively is that it is cumbersome. For example, simply remembering to open certain websites in a sensitive VM can be challenging.

In addition, Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access provides additional security protection against threats and malicious tools, such as ransomware, phishing, keylogging, screen capturing, and human-error data leak threats.

Features of Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access

Let's talk about the features of Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access. The new solution from Hysolate offers the following features for securing your sensitive data:

Redirect sensitive websites to the Hysolate VM
Risky website access on the sensitive VM will redirect to the host environment
Everything in the sensitive VM is encrypted—This feature helps to protect against ransomware extortion
Admin rights are withheld on the Hysolate VM
The isolated VM protects against keyloggers and screenshot captures
The isolated VM environment contains separate instances of Edge/Chrome, so it is isolated from any browser hijacks and malicious plugins on the host system
There is no access to USB devices or printers in the isolated VM environment
The isolated VM environment is reset to a pristine OS image each time the isolated VM starts/restarts

Installation

One of the nice things about the Hysolate solutions, including the new Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access, is the ease of installation and configuration. You don't have to worry about configuring the underlying virtualization layer and the tedious settings often required for it. Instead, the Hysolate installation takes care of the details. The installation process is a "next, next, finish" process.

Beginning the Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access installation process

Hysolate will ask for your email address to begin setting up the Workspace.

Enter your email address for registration

Hysolate will email you a one-time passcode to continue the Workspace configuration.

Enter the one time code sent to your email address

You will also be prompted to install the browser redirection extension in Chrome automatically. It is also available in Microsoft Edge. The browser redirection extension seamlessly passes web links from the host browser to the Hysolate Sensitive Access Workspace.

Choose to install the website redirection browser extensions

After configuring the options for your browser extensions, the Workspace will begin preparing.

Hysolate begins preparing the Workspace for access

After the setup of the Workspace finishes, you will see the Hysolate Workspace icon in the system tray.

Hysolate Workspace runs in the system tray

Configuring Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access

For users who are new to Hysolate, simply download ‘Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access’ from this link.

On the Hysolate flavor menu option, you will see the Change flavor button under Sensitive Access.

Configuring Hysolate Sensitive Access

Once you choose to change the flavor of the installation, you will be prompted to confirm the change.

Confirming the change to Sensitive Access

The Workspace will reconfigure itself.

Workspace reconfigures after the change to Sensitive Access

If you want to view the keyboard shortcuts for switching between Workspaces or install the browser extensions (if you chose not to install them during the initial configuration), click the Guide menu.

Beginning the Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access installation process 1

The Hysolate Free for Sensitive Access browser extension uses the same icon as the system tray utility.

Hysolate Browser redirection plugin installed in Microsoft Edge

Press the Windows key + Alt + Left arrow/Right arrow to switch between your host environment and the Hysolate Sensitive Access Workspace.

The Hysolate Sensitive Access Workspace

The Hysolate Browser Redirection plugin does an excellent job of identifying websites that are most likely sensitive in nature, which you would want to open in the Hysolate Sensitive Access Workspace.

Hysolate automatically prompts you to open sensitive websites in the Hysolate Sensitive Access Workspace

Wrapping up and final impressions

The new Hysolate Free Sensitive Access offering is a great option to provide a secure environment for accessing sensitive data. There is a lot of robust functionality contained in Hysolate Free for Endpoint Threats and Sensitive Access Workspaces. Like the Endpoint Threats solution, the Sensitive Access solution does what it says it can do.

I think the use case provided with the Sensitive Access solution fits a broader group of enterprise customers and helps round out the Hysolate product portfolio. In addition, Hysolate also offers a fully managed enterprise OS isolation solution for end users that businesses can use to control business-critical and sensitive data access.