What a View!

It’s been a great VMWorld so far, and today’s announcements only add to all the buzz amongst the attendees.  I’ve always seen VDI and application virtualization as a way to extend the security, compliance, and availability of the data center out to the end users and VMware’s announcement of VMware View 4.5 with enhancements to security, “check in/check out” and an improved user experience helps further that vision.  Security and compliance has long been a key driver for the adoption of virtualized desktops and VMware delivers with the ability to combine RSA enVision, SecurID and DLP with guidance from an updated RSA SecurBook into your desktop solution.  I think that a ubiquitous and consistent end user experience is vital to the realization of Private Clouds regardless of whether the user is  on campus or not.  It’s not just about a product of course, although EMC and VMware together provide a very robust stack to build upon, you’ve got to approach your virtual desktop infrastructure as a transformation of the desktop, taking the design of the desktop, the virtual infrastructure acting as the delivery mechanism, deployment and migrations, application virtualization, security and systems management all into consideration for your solution.

Desktops have been a growing nightmare for IT organizations, so many different hardware profiles, OS builds, application portfolios, user communities, deployment methods, sprawl, process confusion and dubious security, not to mention spotty backup and recovery capability.  Security has long focused on the end-points as a way to control risk, I’m willing to bet we’ve got more laptops and desktops than we do routers.  And we hire very smart people and give them tools that may or may not meet their needs, a recipe for disaster really.  Desktop and application virtualization affords us the opportunity to do a global reset on a lot of that, pulling back data, applications, and profiles to the virtualized data center or Private Cloud giving your users a secure and compliant set of tools to do their work.  You’ve got to provide an environment that’s not only trusted, but also predictable, IT needs to understand the performance, scalability and interoperability of their virtual environment and application portfolio.

Layer into all of this the fact that many organizations are looking to move to Windows 7 and want that process to be easier than Vista and XP iterations were.  A holistic approach to desktop virtualization can leverage VMware View 4.5 to provide an easier upgrade path for the OS and the opportunity to do security right, building it in from the design of the solution rather than as a bolt-on after deployment.  The number of remote and mobile users is growing every year: security, compliance, systems management and performance concerns are growing along with them.  VMware View 4.5 and the tight integration with RSA’s security products running on top of EMC Proven Solutions for intelligent information infrastructure goes a long way in providing the foundation for an engaging, secure, and compliant end user experience, one of the key promises of cloud computing.

Taking a targeted approach for the implementation of a virtual desktop infrastructure to the most sensitive or highest change environments, like app/dev, is a good way to make use of the enhanced capabilities of VMware View 4.5 and the integration with RSA.  Providing access to a dev/test environment via VDI is a great way to amp up security and compliance if you’ve got a lot of development initiatives always underway or you’re working with offshore resources.  You can extend the security and compliance of a cloud service by making it accessible only via a VDI client, all data now lives in the cloud, secure and available.  Developers, or consultants, working on multiple projects?  Multiple VDI sessions rather than multiple laptops or desktops.  Gain successes and efficiencies and continue to expand the deployment of your VDI solution on their strength and ever important word of mouth.  At EMC we’ve talked about the concept of Information Lifecycle Management for a long time: get the right information, to the right people, at the right time, with an optimized cost structure.  Well RSA takes that concept and extends it with their integration with VMware View 4.5: allow the right people access to the appropriate data via a trusted infrastructure.

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