VDI Security: Are You Giving Customers Moving to VDI the Right Advice?

VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is one way of enabling telework. And in the face of Covid-19, there’s a tele-work avalanche happening around the planet. Some businesses were surprised that transferring employees to their new official workplaces was straightforward; others, not so much. Far too many organizations have been struggling to cope: They waste resources, take unnecessary risks and get bogged down by growing regulatory requirements. The most common culprit? Their choice of security technology.

VDI security is a must. With Gartner predicting that spending on infrastructure protection will increase from $18.3 billion in 2020 to $24.6 billion in 2023, there’s never been a better time for MSPs to make their customers’ lives easier–and safer–with protection for virtualized IT infrastructures, especially VDI. But effective VDI security is a careful balance between security and performance. And the “traditional” agent-based approach, while providing good efficacy, is rarely a frontrunner in the race for efficiency.

Here are some of the key factors that make all the difference in getting that VDI security balance right.

• Choice of security architecture: It can bog the performance or it can achieve significant resource savings, because the right architecture can mean that operations can be optimized and performance kept at a high level. A solution that centralizes the security function by offloading it to a Security Virtual Machine (SVM) should do this.
• VDI-specific optimizations & functionality: VDI is beautiful in the way that it can leverage VM cloning and real-time referencing (golden images). Support for “Golden Image” streamlines provisioning, allows for dynamic application control, enables flexible systems hardening and further performance optimizations.
• Tight Integration with the virtualization platform: Tight integration with the virtualization platform simplifies provisioning, initial setup and operations. Configuration and status reporting, as well as support for a wide range of virtualization platforms–VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, KVM and more–is essential.
• Support for gradual migration: Complicated licensing can make the period of transition from physical to virtual machines tricky for both MSPs and their customers. But it doesn’t have to be a pain. A practical license procedure that straddles both physical and virtual machines during the transition can support secure, step-by-step migration to VDI together with the use of VPN access.

It’s also important to note how you, as an MSP, can benefit from a purpose-built VDI security platform:

• Multi-tenancy: Streamlining of customers’ infrastructure management through a single console helps you be more efficient and more flexible.
• Complete visibility and control: Anything that’s complicated to manage and control encourages human error. Unified policies and tasks, as well as rich reporting and a notification engine, can slash management time, simplify deployment and close security gaps.
• Centralized subscription management: Giving your customer flexible consumption options–and not making reporting and management hell for yourself–is priceless.
• Compliance support: Compliance isn’t an option. Regulations demand that every business secures all desktops that handle data, and this includes virtualized ones. The right VDI security solution helps maintain compliance and maximizes your data and endpoint protection—all while boosting the efficiency and agility of your installations overall.

Moving to Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security, which is built on patented virtualization security technology, can release a significant percentage of virtualization resources in VDI, secure your customers’ move to the cloud and help maintain compliance with relevant standards. We all know that businesses everywhere are looking for fresh ways to strengthen their security, streamline their operations and maximize profit. The logical extension of this is to choose solutions with proven efficacy that deliver fewer incidents, happier customers and higher profit.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.