Research on VDI, thin clients and desktop virtualization inevitably leads to articles on how to deal with latency issues and the end user experience. It only makes sense that pushing data on round trips between client and cloud servers could create some degradation in performance, especially involving bandwidth-hungy applications. Concerns about performance have concerned IT administrators and end users considering significant investments in desktop virtualizaiton products. And an Internet search of these issues uncovers thousands of articles and papers suggesting workarounds.

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.

In doing market research I have come across a report on virtualization from a top tier industry analyst group. In order to project market trends, the report analyst lumped together thin clients and zero clients used in desktop virtualization. This would be like an auto report lumping together Civic sedans and CR-Z sport hybrids. Both are compact Hondas and both are fuel efficient, but users are probably looking for totally different driving experiences in these vehicles. So I believe the analyst in writing that particular research report on the virtualization market was not being as precise with his subscribers as he needed to be.

One of the first questions customers ask me about when deploying VDI is what are the ports that need to be opened to access a Horizon View environment. It's here that I usually rattle off the ports like TCP/UDP 4172, 443, and 3389. I explain to my customers that if they want to avoid a black screen when trying to connect to a VDI session, these ports at a minimum need to be opened. 

What is VDI?

The interest in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is growing each year, as IT managers continually look for ways to decrease IT administrative complexity and lower hardware costs. While momentum for VDI grows, many IT administrators are just beginning to seriously consider evaluations and implementation.