Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been around for years, but the high cost of deployment and issues of scale and performance have traditionally kept most small and mid-size enterprises from adopting the technology. But, the recent boom in mobile technology – along with dramatic improvements in VDI – has changed the landscape a bit. With BYOD becoming more prevalent, some are pushing VDI as a solution to access their work “computer” from any device and any location.

With 81 percent of employees bringing personal devices into the workplace, it is no secret that the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon has set up shop in the corner office of the enterprise. And, with 60 percent of physicians using their mobile phone in the workplace on a daily basis, BYOD has clearly already checked itself into the healthcare industry, as well.

An article in the Guardian last week revealed the U.S. government's PRISM program. The article outlined the government's alleged monitoring of communications at the largest Internet providers (seemingly with the help of these providers). This list of Internet providers includes Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. Now, I want to point out that these are all allegations and that none of this has been verified yet. However, it certainly raises a lot of questions. I wanted to hone in one of the areas that I took note of. There was a mention in this report of other providers the government wanted to monitor, including Dropbox. This again exposes some of the risks that are faced not only by consumers using Dropbox (and similar services) but also the exposure that enterprises and enterprise users face when using these types of services. Many enterprises turn a blind eye towards a lot of this use but it represents a serious risk and raises many questions:

In this modern computing world with multitudes of various trends and innovations, we sometimes find ourselves lost in between new technologies, terminologies and words. Why do we tend to make things more difficult than they have to be? That was my thought when I started a set of blog posts describing the new computing trends in a simple way. Here is another trend that I would like to simplify – virtualization.