A health insurance provider in Tennessee was recently fined $1.5 million by the U.S. Department of Health &amp; Human Services for a violation that occurred in October of 2009.  The violation, a loss of protected health information, occurred when 57 computer hard drives were taken from a training facility while employees were preparing to relocate.  The PHI data on the hard drives was also unencrypted.  The company also provided free credit reporting to nearly all of its 3.1 million customers since it could not determine the actual number of affected customers.

We all know the complexities and costs of managing large geographically separated fleets of desktops.  Just maintaining hardware, OS patches and AV software updates tend to consume all of the small amount of resources that most small to mid-size companies have in their IT budget.  And that doesn't even start to add the complexities of encrypting data at rest on those fleets of pc's.

An often talked about benefit of Virtual Desktops is data security.  I'm not sure that discussion sinks in deeply since we're all worried about how much RAM we might need and how many IOPS we have to plan for in order to avoid the dreaded boot storm.  But, this benefit is real and in this case all the thieves would have walked away with COULD have been some dumb thin clients.  In the VDI world the PHI that was stored on these disks would have never left the data center and had any of the trainees or trainers stored PHI data on their desktops, the data would still have remained in the data center.

I realize there are long lists of pro's and con's along with ROI and TCO models that companies must go through prior to choosing or not choosing VDI but, these 1.5 million reasons go along way to proving that VDI can provide many more benefits to businesses than easier patch or software deployment tasks.