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Focus
Table of Contents

VDI Overview

Your rapidly changing business environment demands a flexible infrastructure to support the evolving desktop, application, and data access requirements of your staff. By implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), you can empower your employees to work independent of location using a variety of devices.
An individual’s user interface in a virtualized environment is called a virtual desktop. Usually, the virtual desktop is stored on a remote server rather than locally. Desktop virtualization software separates the physical machine from the software and presents an isolated operating system for users. When a user logs on to a VDI infrastructure, the infrastructure supplies the user a hosted desktop image.
A VDI environment usually involves running user desktops inside virtual machines that are hosted on datacenter servers. In a VDI environment, each user is allotted a dedicated VM that runs a separate operating system. This is different than a specific VM to which users can connect and from virtualized applications that run in a regular environment.
Although a VDI solution presents many desktop security advantages—including centralized control, reduced complexity, and efficient management of user access and privileges—it is critical to ensure that the entire VDI is secure. Securing this new, centralized environment is increasingly difficult. A single IP address can represent thousands of different users all accessing their applications and data using a variety of devices. Users can also have access to other applications in your data center besides their virtual desktop. By using Traps to secure your VDI environment, you can take advantage of the following benefits:
  • Advanced endpoint protection as part of the Traps solution that prevents sophisticated vulnerability exploits and unknown malware-driven attacks.
  • A highly scalable, lightweight Traps agent that uses an innovative new approach for defeating attacks without requiring any prior knowledge of the threat.
  • Software that is not dependent on scanning or maintaining external updates.
The following topics describe the VDI deployments in more detail: