Top secret government plot to implement Unidesk VDI beta

OK, so the plot isn’t top secret, but if I told you who… well, it wouldn’t be good for either of us.

So what does a top-secret agency talk about when implementing VDI? Interestingly enough, they talk about some of the same things I hear from Universities, Financial Institutions, and BioTech: They talk about image management, storage, security, and personalization.

For this particular location, their largest pain point is managing their Windows 7 images.  Each of their users require a full, personalized desktop that they can not adequately provide with the profile scraping technologies (apparently national security personnel need to install their own applications), so they have hundreds of full, persistent desktops. Not surprisingly, they must put in place all software security updates on-the-double, resulting in frequent OS and application patches.  Their previous virtual desktop update mechanism was as flawed as traditional desktop upgrades, resulting in far too many helpdesk calls.  

When we discussed the reasons behind their choice to be a Unidesk beta site, they said:

“I need [updates] to get deployed faster. If you can save me storage on just the Window7 operating system, I want to move forward.”

Well, rest assured, we are giving them far more than that.  Unidesk’s Composite Virtualization Technology delivers images, applications and patches to end users without failure, and without compromising end user productivity or personalization.  While dramatically reducing storage.

It never occurred to me that building a great management platform for virtual desktops that helps the US government reduce costs might also help me reduce my yearly federal tax bill … a win-win all around.  ;-)

Nicole Reineke, Director of Product Management
Follow me @NicoleReineke