Here’s a cool little thing coming out of VMWorld this week in San Francisco. WYSE technologies, which makes the other half of the virtualized desktop equation that most people don’t think about – thin clients and thin client software – has developed an iPhone appwhich allows you to access a virtualized Windows desktop on your iPhone.
Hey, who wouldn’t want to be able to access their PC from anywhere? Although, this presents a problem when you lose your iPhone, or, if current cellphone trends continue the next few years as thin clients and virtualized desktops mature and are adopted as mainstream enterprise tools, your iPhone is accidentally swallowed.
But what got me thinking about this is the idea of more traditional mobile thin clients – laptops. (Yes, WYSE makes those too). One of the biggest problems that enterprise laptops have produced is a lack of security. The very thing that makes them valuable, portability, makes them easy to lose. And a stolen laptop can have all sorts of compromised data on it – data that your company might not want on the loose.
Operating over a thin client means that, if a laptop or cellphone was lost, the personal data remains inaccessible to the thief, and still accessible to the user. A change of password and you’re done. In fact, the advantages of virtualized desktops are pretty much the same advantages of cloud apps.
There are disadvantages of virtualized desktops as well, of course. There’s the issue of network coverage. You would need to be connected to the Internet in order to use even the basic functions of the computer, and that means either WiFi or 3G or better connection – mostly available but not yet omnipresent; and certainly a problem for international travelers.
And of course, even the biggest and best companies have problems maintaining relatively simple cloud apps, so monitoring dozens or hundreds of virtual desktops will be a challenge.
And I just want to leave you with this thought: I can now theoretically run a virtual Windows OS on my iPhone, but I can’t run a virtual Mac OS on my iPhone…
If you’re talking about thin client access to Mac OSX there are several VNC clients that give you access to a Mac desktop.