UPDATED 17:25 EDT / JULY 01 2013

The Year of the Virtual Desktop? For IaaS Provider Navisite it Definitely Is

If you are a CIO you’ve probably heard it every year. “This is the year of desktop virtualization”. Well, for IaaS provider Navisite, 2013 definitely is the year of VDI, or more precisely Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). It has found a nice growth business, primarily initially in higher education and healthcare, where it has found strong use cases based on the high mobility of end-users and the security concerns. But, says Navisite VP of Product Management Chris Patterson, the appeal is really horizontal.

For instance, “last summer we had several customers in London who wanted us just for a few weeks. They said while the London Summer Olympics were on their employees wouldn’t be able to get to their offices. This constituted a disaster for them.”

The big market drivers, he says, include BYOD and the growing use of contract workers, both on- and off-shore. And one of the big concerns is security.

“Employee expectations have changed,” he said, “And we can thank Apple for that. People have stopped relying on the IT department for their devices. They have their own notebooks and tablets and what have you, and they want to be able to use those devices. I have my Dell laptop that Navisite gave me, and it is something of a pain. And I have my iPad, and I prefer its UI. “

They also want to be able to access their work applications and data at any time from any location. “If someone wants to do some work at 9 p.m. after putting his kids to bed, lying in bed using his tablet, he absolutely should be able to do that. That’s what you want.”

Also today many companies rely on contract workers. “Many software developers today don’t have programmers on their staff. They may find programmers in Iowa or India who are less expensive.”

Those companies don’t want to send laptops to those workers, and they don’t want to give them unlimited access to company assets, particularly given that the engagements may be for only a few weeks or months. They want to set them up and tear down their connections instantly. And because these contractors may be anywhere in the world, they need Internet delivery.

Those companies also often do not know much about their contractors. Are they honest? Are they working for their direct competition as well? With DaaS the company can provide very discreet access to just the company resources the contractor needs without providing access to the company network. It can disable the ports on the end-user’s device, making it impossible for the user to copy or print sensitive code or data. An when the contract is filled, the company can just turn that user’s virtual desktop connection off. That makes DaaS a perfect solution.

Security Advantages

Patterson said Navisite became interested in DaaS two years ago as BYOD began to grow in popularity. Before Navisite, Patterson was a PCI assessor, and he attends RSA every spring, where he saw the security exposure of BYOD become a growing concern. “Last year was when everybody just gave up and said, ‘They’re going to bring their own devices in no matter what we do. So we have to find ways to protect our data.'”

DaaS is a perfect answer, he says, because the device never has direct access to the company network, and the nothing is downloaded onto the device. Each user can only interact with the applications on his specific desktop, and while it looks real it is actually only an image.

On the back end, each user actually has a separate blade, because that is a requirement for Microsoft licensing, so each VDI desktop is physically separate from every other.

Navisite runs on VMware. Initially that created a problem because vSphere lacks the capability to support multi-tenancy, but, Patterson said, they found a company called Desktone “just down the road from us, who has a very nice orchestration provisioning engine that lets us take a common infrastructure and use it in a truly multi-dependent way. And as a bonus, Desktone was also founded by a former PCI guy, which means it designed strong security into its software from the start. And, says Patterson, “No one has ever documented a jailbreak from a VMware VM, so we feel very comfortable with that.”

This means, for instance, that in the higher education environment, where students “put interesting things on their devices,” the university can provide a desktop instance to each student without adding any security exposure or having to worry about students seeing other students’ work or hacking into things they should not be able to access. Since the student’s devices are not actually on the university’s network, any malware on those devices cannot infect the network.

And in healthcare, a provider can similarly provide doctors, nurses, and med techs with very selective access to the records of their patients on their personal tablets, smartphones, and home computers without any concern about improper exposure of personally identifiable patient records. And if a device is stolen or left behind at an airport, the provider does not have to declare a data breach, because no data is ever on the device.

DaaS is also a strong candidate for providing remote offices access to applications and data that need to stay in the main data center or to offices or individual remote employees who lack IT staff to run the application locally.

Managing Expenses

Another big attraction of DaaS is the finances. As with all public cloud services, it basically moves the cost from a big up-front capital expense to an incremental operating expense. And while VDI technology has improved tremendously over the last few years, it is still complex to set up, requiring a dedicated server, flash storage, and often expensive upgrades to the company’s network to support the fast access time that users expect. That can run a company $250,000 in up front costs plus the HR expense of setting it up and supporting it and end-users. The CIO may see the advantages but just not have the budget. Ultimately for them in any given year it is less expensive to continue their three-year laptop replacement program.

DaaS eliminates all that, including the issues of setting up and running a major complex enterprise application, and provides guaranteed service levels. Often, he says, CIOs can cost-justify DaaS on the savings on desktop/laptop replacements as, for instance, they extend the life of laptops from three to five years, while making their users happy by providing virtual desktop access on their personal devices.

It also allows companies to run a small trial to see how it works, then phase in use across the company gradually, testing applications as they go. And of course it is flexible, allowing groups whose needs cannot be met adequately by DaaS — for instance groups working in geographies where Internet connectivity is not commonly available such as parts of Asia and Africa — to opt out.

Patterson believes that DaaS is the future of end-user computing. it provides the best solution to the needs of all concerned including end-users, who need access whenever and wherever they happen to be on whatever device they want to use, and CSOs and CIOs who are worried about providing adequate security for their internal networks and maintaining control over the vital data that is the lifeblood of the company, in the BYOD age.


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