Learn how best to use personal devices in your organization.

Various virtualization solutions are available to meet a wide range of needs. Some, like CloudGateway from Citrix, allow for access to more than the conventional desktop application. They also support secure delivery of mobile-specific applications that can then run natively on the device. “We put a small container on the endpoint device, and that is what Citrix controls,” Lambert explains. Instead of trying to manage the entire device, which might be the employee’s personal unit, IT simply controls access through that container. The user can continue to run their personal applications and data outside of the container at their discretion. Lambert says it’s a good solution for companies that want to allow employees to use their personally owned mobile devices, but don’t want to get into what could be a potential problem if non-personal information is removed when the employee leaves the company.

With 80 employees and users spread out over 18 or so different sites, brokerage firm E.K. Riley Investments LLC needed a secure way to allow remote access to highly sensitive financial data. The XenDesktop platform from Citrix offered the group this kind of anytime, anywhere access while still ensuring their information remained inside the safety of the data center. “A few years ago, we decided that virtualization — bringing first applications and later the desktop — into the data center was a better way to protect our information, and also make support a lot easier,” says Christian Moses, CTO of the Seattle-based firm. His team can now be sure that everyone in the environment is using the same software, plus it’s a less expensive way to manage the secure data feeds the company maintains back to its clearing firm. “We were able to consolidate those points to just a couple of secure facilities, and get out of the router-to-router VPNs and other issues like that,” Moses says.

Industries where data is highly sensitive and also highly regulated have been frequent adopters of virtualization. “Where you want to leverage a common desktop environment for things like the banking industry or the insurance industry, where you know you have a high degree of replication, there is a tremendous benefit to that,” Gula says. Other instances where virtualization is popular include those where no mobile application exists, or where the mobile platform doesn’t have adequate resources (Gula points to the use of ActiveX) to be effective.

And remember: the right solution for an enterprise today could require rethinking tomorrow. “Every year these mobile devices get more and more like a laptop, and the laptops get more and more like a mobile device,” Gula says. Application availability, bandwidth requirements and device size are just some of the factors that could push IT departments toward new solutions in the future.

 

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