This blog was co-written by Jill Smith and Shane Smith, Citrix.
Did you know you can stream a desktop to an endpoint using PVS alone? You can even stream a thin client image to a device that remains in a continuous desired state. Think of the implications for not only repurposing old hardware, but meeting all those Continuous Monitoring requirements and being able to centrally manage a fleet of thin clients! These are just a few of the amazing things you can do without any Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops or DaaS at all!
We recently had the pleasure of speaking with a customer on their use cases for PVS, which led to a trip down the rabbit hole to find out more interesting ways our customers are using PVS!
PVS can actually be used without CVAD/DaaS as a standalone product, physically streaming the OS disk to an endpoint device. These endpoint devices can be “dummy terminals” with no hard drives at all, zero/thin clients, high-end compute and graphics devices, and everything in between.
In some use cases, where security is of utmost importance to the nation, the criteria for an endpoint device is “If a device were to be taken, could it risk national security?” Streaming a locked down, thin OS to a device in a forward-deployed base greatly reduces the risk of data-at-rest on the endpoint, rendering the device unclassified.
We came across a lot of customers streaming to devices with no hard drives, like in correctional facilities, war colleges, or basically anywhere that had complicated processes for hard drive disposal! In the classrooms at the war colleges, not having hard drives in the devices for war game simulators makes it easy to open and close the labs and reset the machines back to the golden image each day. For large facilities, data can be housed in location with a greater amount of physical security, but still accessed conveniently from any area of the facility, without the possibility of the weaponization of hard drives (because both the data on it and the actual hardware itself can both be weaponized!).
To learn more about PVS and find your own awesome use case for it, check out the Tech Brief here and be sure to keep up to date on our Public Sector events and product updates on the totally revamped Citrix Government website!
