VDI: A Real Useful BYOD Enabler

For a growing number of organizations, the road to BYOD begins with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

VDI, which runs the user desktop inside a virtual machine residing on a data center server, enables fully personalized desktops for each user while providing the security and simplicity of centralized management. In recent years, VDI has emerged as a quick and effective way of enabling BYOD without exposing an organization to unnecessary risk. With VDI, existing enterprise applications can run without modification, giving users easy, trouble-free access from their personal mobile devices.

Virtualized desktops improve security because no data resides on any endpoint device. No matter how the user accesses data, it remains safe inside the data center. Another important VDI benefit is malware protection that resides on the server rather than on the user's device. This approach places the responsibility for keeping anti-malware tools current on the IT department rather than on individual users, who may not regularly update their devices. VDI also enables IT departments to deploy and monitor a uniform security software package and to maintain a single set of rules and restrictions. Workers, meanwhile, can access their desktops from any approved device, completely unaware of the safeguards that have already been installed.

“The beauty of VDI is that it is running in the corporate data center, where IT can assure the environment is available 24/7,” says Tisa Murdock, director of industry solutions at VMware. “This is a key enabler of BYOD; the applications and data need to be available when and where the end user is located.”

To learn more about how BYOD is changing and impacting enterprise IT, read our story "What Companies Need to Know About the Current State of BYOD."