The View From NCS Technologies

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.