Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!
Laptop Security, VDI Security and V3 Security
A few days ago the following headline appeared on News Wires:
“BP Employee Loses Laptop With Data on 13,000 Oil Spill Claimants”
The personal information of 13,000 individuals could be compromised by this one lost Laptop. The personal information included the applicant names, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth. Of course this isn’t the first such event. This story is just the latest iteration of many such events. The culprits/victims aren’t just anybody either. They are government agencies, large corporations, financial institutions and large retailers.
The Ponemon Institute’s latest report on Lost Laptops, “The Billion Dollar Laptop Study,” shows that 329 organizations surveyed lost more than 86,000 laptops over the course of a year. Based on these findings, and an earlier survey that put the average cost of lost laptop data at $49,246, the total cost amounts to more than $2.1 billion or $6.4 million per organization.
Let me repeat:
$49,246 COST PER LOST LAPTOP!!! $6.4 MILLION PER ORGANIZATION!!!
No wonder much of middle market and enterprise is projected to transition to Virtual Desktops over the next few years. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) keeps the data centralized and under control of the IT policies in place to protect it. Some of the largest Central Banks are transitioning to VDI not because it performs better and not because it has a cheaper upfront capital cost. The primary reason may be because these firms have too much to lose if policies that rely on human vigilance (i.e. an employee loses a laptop without following encryption policies before its lost) are violated. With the data controlled and centralized a critical loss is less likely to happen.
However, this brings up the cake problem. Current VDI solutions are expensive, complex and leave a lot to be desired for the desktop user. Why should desktop / laptop users have to suffer performance issues and latency in order to have good VDI oriented security? And why should IT management have to incur incredible complexity and expense to satisfy management’s concerns about security? Why can’t both groups have their cake (great desktop experience and easy to install) and eat it too (with security benefits)? V3 Systems thinks you can.
V3′s VDI is fast, its simple, it has low Total Cost of Ownership, it’s scalable and it has all the benefits that make VDI so attractive (centralized controlled data. High Availability and unprecedented Disaster Recovery features). On top of that, in just a few months V3 will be announcing beautifully integrated Trusted Computing Group Standards in VDI. Imagine that, trusted (i.e. fantastically secure) virtual computing with the performance and ease of a laptop.
If you ask me, that sounds like you can have your cake and eat it too and $49,246 buys a lot of cake.