Desktop virtualization to stay as per Citrix's crystal ball

MUMBAI, INDIA: Indian IT services companies today are geared up to offer Desktop as a service which helps the end customers eliminates the need for large Capex investments and also gives them flexibility to extend this solution across the entire enterprise.

As Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, India subcontinent, Citrix looks into the technology crystal ball of 2013 to forecast trends that will witness substantial uptick in 2014; he outlines that Desktop virtualization will remain as the most preferred technology for this transition and more companies will demand this to be delivered to them as a service rather than investing in the entire infrastructure.

Allowing employees to have access to enterprise apps and data anytime, anywhere, using any device - is certainly a pre-requisite for a comprehensive mobility policy. Today all the mobil devices and operating systems seamlessly allow users to share information and data across multiple apps.

"For ex: the users can take a picture and seamlessly post it on Facebook or Twitter in a single click of a button. This flexibility is in the DNA of these mobile platforms but if extended to corporate data and enterprise applications will put many organisations at risk. Thus, security becomes the foremost challenge while adopting a mobility solution and it gets extremely difficult for enterprises to manage sensitive corporate data on personal devices, without gaining access to personal data residing on employee devices.: he stressed in a prognosis for 2014.

To manage mobile apps and data on a user's personal device, while simultaneously maintaining employee privacy, ‘containerization of mobile apps' is a technique that provides complete separation of corporate and personal data on a device. Containerised apps can be centrally managed and driven by tightening the security perimeter to the application layer. Besides that, various enterprise policies can be enforced, that include preventing the user from taking screenshots, copying and pasting content, requiring the mobile device to be connected to a secure wireless network / denying access to content while connected via a cellular network, forcing authentication at every app launch, disabling cloud backup, disabling content being sent via SMS or native email for a secured application and disabling the camera. With more personal devices at the workplace and increasing adoption of BYO policy, organisations will need to adopt containerize apps while embracing a mobility policy, he opined.

Deshmukh argues that companies are looking at shifting their IT spends more towards transformational projects than the business as usual projects. Customers today spend a large  per centage of their IT budgets on IT infrastructure and hence customers are looking at transformational IT infrastructure initiatives to optimise these spends. Desktop Virtualisation is one technology which has seen rapid growth in adoption the last 4 years across industry segments. The primary reason behind this growth is that Desktop Virtualisation offers customers an opportunity to transform their IT infrastructure and increase employee productivity while improving the information security and optimising cost. In the year ahead, more organizations will transition to virtual desktop environment, replacing traditional desktop infrastructure and helping their employees become "Mobile" .