How Is A Virtual Desktop Like a Glass Box?

Yesterday, we produced our webcast “A Game of Trust: Data Security and 3rd Party Contractors,” with Thomas Richardson, CTO of Redwood Trust. One highlight for me (as moderator) was the analogy below that Thomas used to explain virtual desktops to those who have never before used them.

“It’s very hard to sometimes conceptualize what’s going with a virtual desktop environment,” he explained. “When people hear ‘Cloud Desktop’ it’s like ‘well how can my desktop be in the cloud?”…It’s hard to grasp the concept of what’s different about it, because it looks and feels so much like a normal desktop when you’re using it.”

To best explain the concept to his staff, Richardson likens a Cloud Delivered Desktop to a sealed laboratory glove box, especially when it comes to security and control. “Imagine your systems are inside the glass box. You’re trying to protect them from threats on the outside…maybe an infectious disease or any kind of impurities or dirt that you don’t want inside of the box. That’s actually what the virtual desktop does.”

Like the man with the gloves shown on the right, you’re inviting people to use your applications and work in your environment, but they are never actually touching the programs and data that they’re manipulating. There’s no way for users to “infect” the data.

Just by using a virtual desktop, Richardson estimates that you’re getting about 80% of the protection you need. The rest of the security can be accomplished through the 100+ controls that Dizzion offers such as restrictions on printing, copy & paste, Internet access, USB devices, and administrative rights controls.

“[Third-party outsourcers’] systems are not connecting to your systems. There’s this “glass wall” between your internal network and their network, and there’s no way for them to get around that glass wall and through it because of the way that virtual desktops are implemented and deployed,” he concluded.

To hear about this concept and more of the Redwood Trust case study,  watch the webcast recording on our website.

You can also download the slides from the presentation. Unless, of course, you’re accessing it from a virtual glass box.