VDI has come a long way since its origins in 2005 and 2006. When I ran strategic planning for a large virtualization vendor in 2006, analysts declared it to be “the year of VDI.” However, for several years after, it seemed that large scale deployments were always just out of reach for most enterprises because of performance and scale issues.
All that has changed. VDI is finally happening at scale across a variety of industries. The early adopters selected VDI because they were concerned about data security. The early VDI solutions originally had a higher operational cost than running desktops. As you’ll see in the video, the driver has shifted.
VDI is now actually selected for cost of deployment and management, not just security. The security benefit is still there because the data is centralized, but lower operational costs combined with that security benefit are what drives highly regulated industries like finance and health care to really go for VDI on a big scale. A major problem in those industries is stolen laptops. If a laptop containing patient information is compromised, it presents a large regulatory problem as well as legal and marketing exposure for the company.
The original challenges of VDI, performance and scalability, are largely solved in today’s deployments. What used to happen is that customers would deploy VDI and then put their standard endpoint security software on top of it. As you see in the video, what happens next is that customers do not achieve the consolidation ratios that they target.
The problem is that antivirus scans and up soaking up all available CPU, IL, and ran, preventing normal VDI instances from running. Basically, most antivirus software drives over provisioning requirements for VDI, which makes the cost unattractive for enterprises. At least, that’s the way it used to be.
Five years ago, Trend Micro started working with VMware on an agentless model for security that would drive amazing consolidation ratios for VDI. Trend Micro was actually a design partner with VMware to build the APIs that enable this new model of security for virtual machines. For four major software releases over five years, we’ve worked with the Vshield endpoint APIs to make an agentless security model for VDI a reality.
The future of VDI looks bright. Agentless security is an enabling technology that will let VDI go further for things like consumer hosted desktops in the cloud and support for mobile devices using virtual machines. Our expansion of agentless security technologies includes things like antivirus, IPS, data protection, IDS, content integrity, web reputation, et cetera.
VMware changed our endpoint and datacenter computing paradigm, and Trend Micro drove the paradigm change for VDI security. Agentless security has unleashed VDI so it can finally reach its full potential across PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.
Innovative VDI Security Saves You More (Chapter 2)
Trend Micro and VMware: Lowering VDI Costs (Chapter 3)
