Island, The Enterprise Browser

Island Enterprise Browser is my main use case to give secure access to corporate web and SaaS applications, primarily for contractors, third-party vendors, BYOD users, and remote employees. Before Island, we used VDI and VPN plus endpoint DLP for these scenarios. The setup was expensive, slow for end users, and difficult to maintain.

With Island, users get a familiar Chromium-based browser and we enforce security policies on the browser side without managing the whole device.

For a specific example of how I use Island for secure access, we leverage the many different data controls inside Salesforce. Copy-paste is allowed within Salesforce but blocked to outside applications. Downloads, printing, and screenshots are blocked.

Customer phone number and national ID fields are masked unless the agent has a specific role. The watermark with the agent username and timestamp appears on the screen to deter phone photos. In terms of visibility, every session is logged, including login page visits and blocked actions, and this is forwarded to SIEM.

Onboarding has improved significantly, dropping from days with VDI provisioning to under an hour. The VDI cost for that group is eliminated and the security team has better visibility than before.

A remote employee, a sales representative on a personal laptop, gets full access to email and the CRM in Island. However, the policy blocks pasting customer data into public GenAI tools such as ChatGPT and blocks uploading files to personal cloud storage.

Island has positively impacted my organization by reducing costs. We reduce or eliminate VDI licenses and infrastructure for contractors and BYOD users. On the speed and operational side, there is now visibility into actions inside the SaaS apps that was not available before. Additionally, there are fewer data leakage incidents via copy-paste, downloads, or GenAI tools.

The best features Island offers, which stand out the most to me, are download, upload, print, and screenshot controls that can be set per app, per user group, and per device posture.

I would add that the built-in ZTNA style to access internal web apps and data masking and watermarking is very useful. Island can sense and mask sensitive fields. The GenAI data protection is also noteworthy.

Regarding Island's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are not complete yet. There is not a complete AI governance program in place. It should sit alongside an AI usage policy, endpoint DLP coverage for non-browser tools, and data classification.

However, the Island GenAI control turned out to be one of the most valuable parts of the platform for us. We gained visibility into which AI tools our employees were actually using, which was more than expected.

I find that the AI-related detections are reasonably accurate once tuned. In the first few weeks, we saw some false positives, mostly examples of internal reference numbers flagged as issues. However, by adjusting the data patterns, the noise dropped significantly.

We still review blocked events periodically and would not rely on it as our only control.

I think Island can be improved in terms of change management and adaptation. The user has to switch browsers, getting Island set as a default, and stopping people from going back to Chrome or Edge for corporate apps takes policy enforcement and communication.

The browser extension options help cover what happens beyond the browser. Island only protects what happens in the browser. Native desktop apps, thin clients, Outlook desktop, SAP, and local Office files need other tools. Therefore, it does not fully replace VDI or endpoint DLP in every scenario. However, there is a newest advantage for mobile parity because mobile platforms do not get offered the full set of desktop controls.

I would add that mobile is the weakest area today. The controls we enforce on desktop are not fully available on iOS and Android. For mobile users, we still depend on our MDM solution.

My advice is to start with one clear use case such as contractor access and expand from there. The technical deployment is the easy part, but policy design and user communication take real effort.

I have been using Island for six or seven months.

Island is stable.

The scalability has been very good because it is SaaS managed and runs on the endpoint. We scaled from over 500 user pilots to 1,500 users without issues.

The customer support team has helped us design our initial policies, and support tickets are usually resolved effectively. I rate the customer support as a nine.

Island is deployed as a SaaS solution managed from the Island cloud console, with the browser deployed on the user endpoints. For internal applications, we use connectors in our own network. In practice, it is a hybrid setup.

We have not formally measured ROI yet, but the reduced VDI usage and faster onboarding have clearly lowered our costs and IT workload.

We evaluated other options including Prisma Access Browser and Google Chrome Enterprise Premium.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate Island as 8.5.

I choose 8.5 because I believe there is a need for some improvements, particularly on the mobile side.

My advice to others looking into using Island is to start with one clear use case such as contractor access, BYOD, or GenAI governance, and run a proof of value before expanding. The technical deployment is quick, but real time should be spent on policy design and user communication because adaptation depends on it.

Check whether your critical apps are browser-based since Island does not cover thick clients, and confirm mobile requirements early. Finally, build your business case against VDI, VPN, and DLP costs because that is where the ROI is clearest.