Mark Tempelton: VDI is a lot of smoke, without a fire

At the Citrix iForum, Mark Tempelton, CEO of Citrix, said, “VDI is a lot of smoke, without a fire today”. The comment came at a time when Vmware, Citrix, Microsoft are all view VDI or desktop virtualization as the new untaped area of growth of the virtualization market.

The view also may be different for Citrix than it is for other companies. Citrix owns most of the remote desktop market today. Citrix deployments tend to be for line of business applicaitons, where the easiest way to get the application to the end-user was to share it via Citrix.

There is one gap in particular where a competitor can find a foothold. In almost every large deployment of Citrix, there are some applications which did not work with the Citrix isolation. This is not easy for Citrix to fix without doing something custom for each application. They are really good candidates for using VMs and VDI.

Citrix is not widely used for general purpose remote desktop. There are vertical and sub-segments of the market like call centers where it is deployed today. The remote desktop like gotomypc is used for remote debugging. Any other serious uses out there?

So Mark’s comment is insightful because he has the best view of the industry. General purpose VDI may be more hype than reality today.

Solidcore offers database audit solution for PCI

Auditing the database is a compensating control for the lack of encryption of the database. Prat Moghe wrote a great article about this.

Solidcore’s S3 Control product has advanced Database Auditing capability which meets the section 10 audit logging requirements as well as act as a compensating control for database encryption. Very large # of databases on unix, pc and mainframe platforms are supported by S3 Control

This capability is also integrated into the file integrity monitoring capability of the S3 Control product. The two combined products are helping customers achieve PCI compliance all over the globe.

Who made the change?

One of the reasons a lot of customers love the Solidcore software is its capability to detect who made the change, with 100% certainity on all platforms. What customers notice is that it becomes a catalyst for change control adoption in the organization and greatly enhances the value of their change ticketing and data center automation solutions.

Most organizations started down the change management path with a change ticketing system: Remedy or Magic or Peregrine or HP Service Center. This is an important leg of “closed loop changed management”. But how do you drive your organization to begin following the process to file tickets? And not do things which are not in those tickets? Near impossible. Usually one finds out only when there is an outage or problem of some sort that change is happening. But finding this out is NOT ACTIONABLE, because you can’t link what has happened with a person or department.

 So the ability to say that “ROB IN DEVELOPMENT” made this change is HUGE. Once people know that things can be traced back to them, they clean up their act really fast, you would be pleasently surprised.