Virtualisation can blend individual freedom with organisational control

Stephen Withers
Monday, 25 October 2010 07:34

Business IT - Technology

"Virtualisation is a consequence of Moore's Law," according to Citrix's Simon Crosby. What does he mean?

"Every once in a while, something really dramatic happens," Simon Crosby, chief technology officer for virtualisation and management at Citrix, told attendees at McAfee's Fusion 2010 security conference. Virtualisation is one such thing.

Intel has been driving technology for decades, he said, and "virtualisation is a consequence of Moore's Law." The dramatically increased power of CPUs compared with those of a decade ago makes it possible to run 100 virtual machines on one processor rather than dedicating it to a single system.

But there's more to virtualisation than virtual machines running on servers. The trend towards people working in multiple locations and using multiple devices means much of IT needs to be virtualised - meetings, support, clients, desktops, applications, networks, servers, and clouds, he suggested.

"Security has to be virtualised too, and that's a major challenge," Crosby said.

Virtualisation, he suggested, is the way that IT departments can deal with the consumerisation of technology. If an IT manager tries to go up against Apple, he or she will lose, Crosby suggested. Home IT equipment is generally much better than that routinely purchased by organisations, and that is leading to a battle for control that can be avoided by allowing employees to use whatever device they favour and then using virtualisation to securely deliver a standardised desktop environment to it.

So how does Citrix offer to help this situation? See page 2.