We began pilots over two years ago with some early adopter customers. Since then, these customers have gone into production – in some cases even increasing the size of their deployment – and now they’re beginning to see real, tangible business benefits from a centrally managed, distributed execution approach to desktop virtualization:
- A Silicon Valley-based international law firm saw its employee satisfaction ratings skyrocket
- A Global investment banking and securities firm whose traveling executives can carry one laptop (either a Mac or PC) for both work and personal use
Full Windows 7 support.
In my recent blog about the costs of Windows 7 migrations, I argued that this massive IT disruption could be a golden opportunity to future-proof the management architecture. And with 3.0, we’ve given IT leaders just that.
Rather than having to go from one desktop to the next and one office to the next over a 12 to 30 month period to manual upgrade machines, enterprises can implement MokaFive Suite to create a full Windows 7 VM that runs on existing hardware – and still access legacy applications – without waiting for the hardware refresh cycle. This means no additional capital costs to migrate to Windows 7, and companies can refresh hardware on their own timeline.
MokaFive’s Windows 7 support is not just a container. We now have full layering support on Windows 7 both in terms of AD domain join layering, OS layering, user-installed apps, data and settings. We have changed the architecture of the layering so that it leverages some of the inherent features of Windows 7 much better.
Data center to endpoint security.
In the past, we’ve often talked about our seven layers of security, but for MokaFive Suite 3.0, we upped the ante with security at the device level.
With server hosted desktop virtualization solutions, you can secure the data in the data center, but how do you ensure that the browser accessing the VM is not being screen-scraped at the endpoint? Back in August, we announced a partnership with AVG to solve exactly this security gap; MokaFive Suite 3.0 now takes advantage of this full integration. The solution includes a secure virtual encrypted desktop container that can be deployed to the endpoint and further be secured from key-logging and screen-scraping attacks from the host machine by the AVG security scanning capability. Now virtual desktops can be a secure container that can be accessed by many devices, both corporate and personal.
Desktop management as-a-service.
We’ve been talking to some managed service providers that wanted to be able to leverage MokaFive Suite to deliver desktop management services to multiple organizations and their end-users. It seemed like a great idea, so we created a multi-tenant infrastructure as well as new reporting tools and the ability to delegate management to any tenant.
We see 3.0 valuable to three types of providers:
- Outsourced services firms currently using “brute force” to manage desktops for their clients. Now, with a single platform, they can increase the operational efficiency of their delivery model.
- Service providers and carriers that want to expand their footprint with a client or to add a new revenue stream.
- Hosting companies that have no specific desktop management expertise but want to add more services and move beyond providing just rack space.
Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing
