Rethinking Thin Clients from a Security Perspective

The recent events surrounding the treacherous activities of Edward Snowden should make most of us think long and hard about the measures we are taking to secure our corporate data. Are we giving our administrators too much access? Do we fail to audit and report on how the data is being accessed and used? Is our data just too mobile? Unfortunately the answer to all three of these is yes.

Can Microsoft succeed as a DaaS provider with Mohoro?

The recent rumors of Microsoft working on a hosted virtual desktop (DaaS) solution to add to their cloud services offering may actually end up being one of the most viable options for organizations who already rely heavily on Microsoft infrastructure to run their business. Having all of your core services being delivered from a single location and provider could ease the operational concerns of some who find running a hybrid of on-premise and hosted solutions still requiring the same amount of operational support.

Virtual Desktop Patching and Data Protection

Data Protection and patch management of virtual desktops, while not a sexy topic, is one that should happen on a regular basis within any organization implementing or working to implement virtual desktops. Recently, we have been testing virtual desktop software and there is a huge difference between patching and protecting data in a small number of instances and 1000s of instances. There are scale considerations as well as ease of use for file level and system recovery as well as issues with patching virtual desktops (not to mention other security issues).

VDI Stall: VDI Appliances solve the hardware problem so, what next?

We’ve discussed the fact that VDI appliance makers were making good progress simplifying adoption of a virtual desktop infrastructure. An appliance-based route to market can be seen as win-win: being designed both to reduce cost and complexity of implementation (for the customer) and shorten sales cycles (for the vendor). So goes the theory. To understand this theory further one VDI appliance vendor, Pivot3, commissioned Dimensional Research to survey global IT in order to get real-world insight into the state of VDI.