Growth of VDI Leads to New Security Challenges

By Stephanie Jordan
in

According to a recent study by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 60 percent of enterprises have a desktop virtualization strategy and 45 percent of them will have virtualized 50 percent of their desktops within the next three years. But despite the smaller economic impact of cleaning or rebuilding infected virtual endpoints, most usage scenarios of virtual desktops have a risk profile nearly identical to that of physical desktops.

Trend Micro, Inc. believes the temptation for enterprises is to deploy their existing non-virtualization-aware endpoint security to their virtualized endpoints. Doing so, the company says, poses significant performance challenges on the shared VDI server hardware, leaving end-users negatively impacted. In the end, enterprises are forced to choose between poor VDI Return on Investment (ROI) or poor security along with potential lack of regulatory compliance.

Last month, Trend Micro announced “the industry’s first hypervisor ‘agnostic,’ virtualization-aware endpoint security offering”. OfficeScan 10.5, according to Trend Micro, enables customers to maximize the number of virtualized desktops per host, contributing to a higher ROI of a customer’s VDI investment without lowering security standards. Based on its internal testing, using OfficeScan enterprises can more than double the number of virtual machines per VDI host – without sacrificing security.

For more, read Trend Micro’s whitepaper, “When Desktops Go Virtual,” which examines the security challenges enterprises face within a virtual desktop environment.

Trend Micro OfficeScan 10.5 is expected to be available later this month.

Published July 8, 2010