Citrix Synergy in San Francisco was an exciting place to be this week – beautiful weather and lots of cool VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) technology. I was hoping to learn more about cloud & what’s going on when XenServer, but most of the focus was VDI.
Lots of enterprises are dipping their toes into the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) waters and looking to overcome the security challenges posed by VDI environments (maximizing guest OS density, scheduled scan “storms” hammering servers, the 8 AM problem when lots of VDI images fire up simultaneously and receive pattern file updates).
Citrix announced that they intended to deliver new security APIs – Citrix’s CTO Simon Crosby had a lengthy explanation of Citrix’s intention in his blog.
From a Trend Micro perspective, open security APIs are goodness. Trend leverages security APIs that are open and appropriate – we have supported VMware VMsafe APIs with products such as Trend Micro Deep Security 7.0 and Trend Micro Core Protection for Virtual Machines 1.0 (known affectionately as CPVM) since 2009. As the Citrix APIs become real (I could find nothing yet published), you can anticipate that Trend Micro will take advantage of them.
Trend already has engineered our virtualization offerings to leverage such APIs, so integrating our existing connectors into what Citrix has baking should be relatively straightforward (again, nothing published by Citrix yet, so definitive statements will have to wait).
I do have to toot the Trend Micro horn when it comes to virtualization security. There were security vendors at Citrix synergy talking about products available in 2H2010, but Trend Micro has a portfolio of solutions today that secure servers, be they physical, virtual, private or public cloud. We are also working on some upcoming VDI security stuff to solve some of the VDI resource utilization challenges, and those goodies should see the light of day shortly.
