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.

Testing within the Virtual Environment

There has long been a debate about testing products within a virtual environment. Not just on how, but the why as well as the what to test. There are limits in some EULA’s as well on the reporting of such testing. This was the subject of the 7/25 Virtualization Security Podcast (#112 – Virtualization Security Roundtable) held Live from NSS Labs in Austin, TX. Where we delved into the issues of testing within a virtual environment. While the discussion was about security products, it is fairly straight forward to apply the concepts to other products within the virtual environment.

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).

Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 – VDI Game Changer?

And now to their portfolio, Atlantis Computing add ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0. Some early stability issues aside, Atlantis have developed a strong and supportive market and expanded on it. What is in this release? If 2013 is to be the year of VDI – how does Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 help? Importantly, will Atlantis Computing’s ILIO Persistent VDI change the game?

VMworld 2012: Dell grows VDI Services

In the face of declining PC revenues and slowing storage sales VMworld San Francisco saw the launch of two new Wyse P Class Zero Clients, two new EqualLogic hybrid storage arrays and three new reference architectures optimized for VMware View, signaling a clear intent from Dell that it is getting serious about VDI.