Laptop Vendor Information

We work with a limited number of trusted hardware vendors globally to ensure a high level of quality and support. Below are our guidelines for selecting or current vendors and potentially onboarding new ones.

Laptop Vendor Selection Criteria

When selecting laptop vendors, CorpSec weighs factors like privacy, security, availability, and compliance to ensure we choose reliable suppliers for team member devices.

By its very nature, GitLab has historically been very open as a company, starting as open source and migrating from a group of coders with their own laptops to an organization that needs to protect not just their own corporate data but customer data as well.

Having developed a Data Classification Policy and currently implementing Zero Trust, we’ve had to make adjustments in laptop recommendations.

Our laptop vendor selection criteria is as follows:

Team member need

The main need centers around processing power and the operating system support for required workloads. Most modern systems meet the processing power needs of our team members.

Security needs

GitLab needs the ability to ensure a secure and stable platform. From an operating system perspective, macOS and Linux meet these needs. The Security team has found a slight advantage in Ubuntu as a Linux distribution due to their rapid response time when it comes to patching security flaws, and we recommend this distribution. It is necessary to use an approved Linux distribution.

Compliance needs

To meet compliance standards, we restrict sensitive data access to company issued laptops with monitored software. This approach allows us to demonstrate compliance to internal and external auditors. We use macOS (Apple) and Linux (Dell) systems to ensure security compliance, including regular system patching and firmware updates for Linux devices.

This simplifies the ability to support customers which may impose restrictions on team members working in support roles for that customer solely based upon the hardware they are using.

Logistics needs

To be able to use a laptop vendor, we have to be able to purchase and ship hardware to our team members, regardless of where they live. Therefore the vendors should be able to handle most, if not all shipping requirements globally.

Our current hardware vendors are: CDW for US requests. Presidio for EMEA requests. Sycomp for most other regions.

GitLab laptops that are purchased from our vendors will come with GitLab branded asset labels by default. Please refer to this issue for more information on GitLab asset labels. GitLab Branded Laptop Labels