Manage Your Virtual Desktop with Layers
Desktop management is becoming more and more challenging. Today employees are far more tech-savvy than they were just a few years ago. This has led to greater productivity, but also increased the demands on technology. Employees need flexibility to be productive. They expect to have access to information wherever they go, whether they are in the office, at home or on the road. People want to be able to install their own browser plugins and drivers for their home printers. They expect to be able to do research on Google, network on LinkedIn, pay their bills online, and connect with friends on Facebook anytime. The distinction between work life and home life is blurred - people work from home, and do personal tasks at work.
Business needs also present their own set of technology challenges. Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and the data breach notification laws that exist in most states, make security breaches very costly. Malware has become increasingly vicious and an attack can instantly cripple an organization and cost millions of dollars to clean up. Furthermore, the current economic climate introduces a whole other set of difficulties. Today's IT organizations have to do more with less: Budgets have been frozen and hardware refresh cycles have been extended. Additionally, there are more temporary and contract workers, which in turn introduces new provisioning and de-provisioning issues. And despite all these circumstances, IT is expected to move more quickly than ever to keep up with the accelerating pace of business.
The problem is that desktops are monolithic. Everything - the hardware, operating system, corporate applications, user-installed applications, plugins, user data - are all mixed up together so it is difficult to manage or control one without affecting the others. For example, locking down the operating system may make it more secure, but that could prevent the employee from installing an application or plugin he or she needs to be productive. To further complicate the situation, different parties are often responsible for different components. The hardware may be employee-owned, while the operating system is provided by a desktop engineering group, the corporate applications are supplied by the department, and the security updates are controlled by yet another group.
Desktop virtualization has been heralded as a panacea to these problems. By separating the software from the hardware, desktops become easier to manage. However, simply moving the desktop into a virtual machine does not solve the fundamental issue of managing the desktop, nor the fact that different parties are responsible for different parts of the desktop and these parties have conflicting concerns. Traditionally these issues have been resolved by either locking down the desktop, reducing functionality and thereby end-user productivity, or by giving each user their own unique desktop instance, which leads to image sprawl and makes them difficult to manage. But there is another way.
Virtual Layers
Just as you can use virtualization to separate software from hardware, you can similarly use virtualization to separate a desktop into virtual layers that can be managed individually. These layers are dynamically composited to provide a single unified view of the system. For example, you can separate the desktop into a layer for the operating system, a layer for targeted corporate applications, a layer for user applications and a layer for user data. Each of these layers are kept separate and can be managed individually, but to the user it looks and feels like a traditional desktop.
