Recently, IBM and Canonical announced a virtual desktop product, based on Linux. Their announcement matches the commonIT market vision, covered by David in his “Back to the dumb terminal” article.
Some may ask “if the desktop is virtualized, why would you want to virtualize the web browser?” The answer is simple: while desktop virtualization has a number of advantages (cost reduction for instance), it doesn’t solve web browser security issues; the threat is simply moved from a physical computer to a virtual environment and as long as the web browser runs in the same environment as other applications and sensitive data, security issues still exist.
That’s why we recommend “double virtualization”: a virtual browser running on a virtualized desktop — at least as long as users are still dependent on non-web applications. And once all applications are webified, Virtual Browser delivers the single secure client for the enterprise information system - there’ll no longer be any need for a full client-side OS.
Tags: desktop, IBM, virtualization
