The Situation
A CISO, VP Engineering, or CIO whose engineering capacity depends heavily on vendors and contractors, and who protects proprietary code today by putting those people behind VDI. The VDI bill grows with every seat, onboarding a vendor engineer takes days, and vendor hours are billed while engineers fight typing lag. Now AI coding tools have arrived, and VDI handles them badly: inline completions are unusable over a streamed desktop, so contractors paste code into personal AI accounts in a side browser window. The perimeter that justified the VDI spend has a hole in it, and nobody has an inventory of which vendors are using which AI tools on which repositories.
The Value
The engagement moves the security boundary from the contractor's screen to where code actually executes. Code, git history, builds, and AI agent runs stay in containers inside your cloud VPC; your git host accepts clone and push only from that VPC's egress IPs; AI traffic routes through a corporate gateway with zero-data-retention keys. The result is stronger containment than VDI, a governable path for AI, and developers working natively with zero UI latency — backed by a cost model built from your actual invoices, not industry averages.
How It Works
- Current-State Discovery — external workforce, device posture, and repository access inventoried; VDI estate and git host configuration reviewed; sanctioned and shadow AI usage surfaced.
- Threat Model & Cost Model — every code exfiltration and AI egress path mapped under current and target architectures; VDI vs. CDE total cost of ownership built from your billing data.
- Target Architecture & Governance Design — managed identities tied to your IdP, CDE control plane selection, egress IP allowlisting, AI gateway pattern, devcontainer standard, and a cohort-by-cohort migration roadmap.
- Pilot (optional) — one vendor team on one repository, with onboarding time, editor responsiveness, cost per developer-hour, and blocked exfiltration attempts measured.
What You Get
| Deliverable | Description | Value to You |
|---|---|---|
| External Workforce & Code Access Inventory | Every vendor and contractor, their device posture, and what repositories they can reach and how | Answers "who can clone what, from where" — a question most organizations cannot answer today |
| Exfiltration & AI Egress Threat Model | Every path by which code can leave, under current and target architectures | Makes the control gap concrete, including the AI-shaped hole VDI leaves open |
| VDI vs. CDE Cost Model | Total cost of ownership built from your own invoices, scaled by headcount | A finance-defensible business case based on your numbers, not vendor marketing |
| Target Reference Architecture | Identity, CDE control plane, network perimeter, and AI gateway as one design | One coherent design rather than four separate tool purchases |
| AI Tooling Governance Policy | Company-provided vs. BYO AI rules, with contract language for vendor agreements | Converts shadow AI into governable AI, with enforceable vendor terms |
| Reference devcontainer & Enforcement Runbook | Environment baseline plus git host settings for identity, IP allowlisting, and fork/export blocking | Your platform team implements without starting from a blank page |
| Migration Roadmap | Cohort-by-cohort VDI retirement, sequenced by risk and cost | Exits VDI without a disruptive cut-over |
Typical Duration
3 weeks for assessment and design; 6 weeks with the pilot. A single git host organization, one cloud provider, and fewer than 5 vendors completes design in 3 weeks. Multi-cloud estates, regulated code (PCI, HIPAA, export-controlled), or many vendors on differing contract terms typically add a week.
Why Now
VDI was purchased to keep code from leaving. AI tooling has quietly undone that — a contractor who cannot get inline completions inside a streamed desktop will paste the problem into a personal AI account in the next browser tab. You pay full VDI cost for a perimeter that no longer holds. AI adoption among external engineers is happening now, governed or not; VDI and vendor contract renewals are the natural decision points, and this engagement should land before the next one.
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