The View From NCS Technologies

We wrapped up booth operations today in Baltimore at the 2015 Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium and many conversations centered on the topic of virtualization.  Whether virtualizing the desktop in a datacenter environment (VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, etc.) or on a host workstation (OpenXT, SecureView) everyone recognizes the benefits of consolidation and centralizing management.

Secure, multi-level computing in government agencies has always been a challenge for end users and IT administrators. The idea of consolidating networks to fewer physical machines is not new, and has been addressed in different ways by various hardware and software approaches over the years. This blog addresses SecureView in this context.

SecureView, the Latest Approach

SecureView represents the latest approach to the multi-level network problem. SecureView is a multi-level virtual platform which allows a user to run multiple securely isolated environments on a single PC, provide hardware-enforced security and deliver superior virtualization in the most demanding environments. The virtual platform is made possible by extensive development work by the Air Force Research Laboratory, the open source community, Assured Information Security and NCS Technologies. Other programs such as DTS and SABER aimed to achieve similar goals but none of them do it as well. 

Over the last two years, in addition to standing up our internal Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, NCS successfully converted a number of older physical servers to virtual machines running in a VMware environment. Our primary reasons for doing this were a mix of aiming to reduce cooling costs and energy footprints, as well as replacing aging servers. 

Just back from a whirlwind week at HIMMS 2015!  While hospitals and other healthcare organizations have been early adopters of our Cirrus LT mobile zero client laptop, I went to Chicago this week a little uncertain about how widely adoption of VDI technology might occur.  By the afternoon of opening day, all of my uncertainty was gone.  We showed off Cirrus LT and gave a sneak peak of Cirrus DT WiFi, the latest addition to the NCS Technologies PCoIP mobile zero client family.

If you are considering migrating to a virtual desktop infrastructure but are afraid performance for your demanding users will suffer, a hyper-converged appliance might just be your answer. Most IT administrators are leery about moving their knowledge workers and powers users to a virtual environment because of historically poor performance associated with latency and bandwidth constraints. Recent advancements in Solid State Drives (SSDs), GPU technology, and more efficient network protocols coupled with improvements in the hypervisor’s file system have made moving these workloads to VDI not only possible but, in many cases, a better experience for the end user.

VDI and desktop virtualization are being implemented for many reasons these days, including strong security. Outside of the obvious needs in government, the intelligence community and the military, is there a need for desktop-virtualization-based strong security in the enterprise, such as healthcare and finance?

The short answer is, yes!  I have encountered a number of people who ask me “Who, besides intelligence agencies and military, really needs the level of strong security zero clients offer?”  Admittedly, I had the same question when we first began development work on our own zero client products, such as the Cirrus LT zero client laptop.  Fact is, there are many industries which are severely impacted by data theft every day.  More and more often we hear about security breaches and data leaks with catastrophic consequences.

Consider the healthcare industry.  Healthcare providers are constantly accessing sensitive patient records with very personal information.  Zero clients allow you to enable a remote or mobile worker and still comply with HIPAA, PHI and ePHI by restricting the ability to download and store data locally.  Nothing stored, nothing lost.