VDI News Roundup: Week of May 22

In case you didn’t have time to keep up with this week’s virtual desktop headlines, here are a few of our favorites for the week of May 22, 2017.

Is VDI Susceptible to Ransomware Threats?

With the WannaCry ransomware attack making headlines (and causing headaches) around the work in the past few weeks, ransomware threats are capturing a lot of attention. The big question for anyone who uses a virtual desktop is, “Is this something I need to be concerned about?” This TechTarget article gives a nice breakdown of how ransomware could interact with a virtual desktop … including some bigger issues the threat can cause if data isn’t regularly backed up. It largely comes down to how virtual desktops are set up and how diligent companies are about data security and disaster recovery.

Favorite quote:

“There is one situation where virtual desktops can protect a user against ransomware threats. If the person is using a PC as a thin client device, and the PC’s local operating system became infected with ransomware, then the infection should not be able to jump from the computer’s local operating system to the virtual desktop. Hence, the organization’s data would only be at risk if the thin client’s local operating system contained network drives that were mapped to the organization’s servers.”

Read the full article >>

Last week we published some key security takeaways that will help organizations protect themselves in case of a similar attack. Read 3 Security Takeaways from the WannaCry Attack for more insight and best practices.

[Report] State of the VDI/SBC Union Survey Results

VDI Like a Pro released a comprehensive report that looks at the current state of VDI and server based computing (SBC) – or, as TechTarget points out in an article about the survey, of the end user computing space more broadly.

This global survey was intended to gain insights into the “usage, configuration and trends in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Server Based Computing industry.” You can gain some quick insights on the survey’s landing page before diving into the 77 page document that covers topics like:

• What is the most important reason to use this VDI environment?
• What is the capacity of simultaneous desktop sessions for this VDI environment?
• What percentage of the desktop VMs are shared/pooled/stateless?
• What operating systems (OS) are used for desktop VMs?

Favorite quote:

“Providing DaaS, anywhere access, centralized management and flexible working are the key drivers for VDI usage. While SBC was much more focused on cost-reduction, customers chose other reasons to use VDI. … Smaller VDI deployments are decreasing, likely due to DaaS, mobile and SaaS/web application delivery. SME customers remain steady, while bigger (25.000-99.000) and large enterprise (100.000+) usage of VDI increased. Historical challenges, such as cost, complexity and performance have been solved within VDI.”

Read the full article and get the report >>

Build Your Own or Engage an Expert? Navigating Today’s VDI Options

The argument of whether to build a from-scratch, in-house VDI implementation or outsource the project to a specialized DaaS provider is one we hear a lot. The truth is, building VDI from the ground up is difficult, costly and comes with a lot of on-going maintenance and updating. With another option run by experts and highly maintained infrastructure, why would anyone choose to do it in house? That’s the argument this article in ITProPortal nicely illustrates.

Favorite quote:

“Of course no one would build a car from scratch just to go out to dinner. It sounds ridiculous, right? But that’s what you’re doing when you choose an old-school VDI 1.0 solution over a cloud-native VDI solution.”

Read the full article >>

The article doesn’t go into too much detail about how VDI technology has changed in recent years. For more on that topic, check out It’s Time to Revisit VDI.