Securing Desktops In A Virtual World

07/04/2010

By David Ting, CTO Imprivata

For many IT managers, the best part of 2009 was the fact that it ended. Pressure to achieve better results on reduced budgets was a serious challenge from companies worldwide. With the weight of the recession slowly beginning to lighten, organisations now have the opportunity to step back and reassess the needs of their IT infrastructures. For many, securing that environment whilst remaining sensitive to cost is a top priority.

Many forward-thinking organisations have already, or indeed have plans to explore virtualisation technologies. Through virtualization, businesses can take advantage of reduced hardware, power and maintenance...

...costs and allow IT to work smarter. With the server virtualisation market seeing continued and indeed accelerated growth over the past five years, other areas of virtualisation technology have also now begun to take their place under the CIO spotlight.

IT managers and CFOs are intrigued by the financial and security benefits of removing CPUs from office desks and as a result, desktop virtualisation has become increasingly popular. Desktop virtualisation (VDI) essentially allows the desktop experience to be delivered from a server to any network device. This means simple access to the corporate network is available to users working both inside the office and remotely. In layman's terms, this means that users will experience a consistent desktop interface regardless of the device from which they are accessing the data. From a remote working perspective, VDI can completely eliminate the need for organisations to web-enable legacy applications.

VDI is also attractive from a cost saving perspective. By stripping away localized hardware and storing data for multiple user desktops centrally from one server, hardware and maintenance costs are reduced. Furthermore, by managing data access centrally, IT staff have increased control over who is accessing what and... continued on page two >

 

 

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