The fact that a company’s information is scattered across vast numbers of desktop and laptop hard drives creates multiple headaches, not the least of which arises when a lawsuit or regulatory proceeding requires the company to inventory and/or recover the information stored on those drives.
One solution, provided by software vendors such as Citrix, turns laptops and desktops into mere terminals connecting to company data which resides on company servers. This approach took another step forward last month, at least in terms of user experience, when Intel and Citrix announced that they will embed a Citrix hypervisor (a virtual machine for running the Citrix terminal application) within laptops and desktops, thereby substantially improving performance by allowing more work (including access to USB peripherals) to happen on the remote machine. There is an interesting dynamic between corporate IT departments, who generally want to “lock down” company PCs to guard against user misuse and abuse, and corporate IT users accustomed to privacy and the trust of their employers. It will be interesting to see how the embedded hypervisor strategy will affect that dynamic, as it may in essence allow company PCs to operate in both “company” and “personal” modes.
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