Citrix and McAfee jointly announced MOVE AV, an antivirus software package that protects and secures XenDesktop virtual machines.
Citrix Systems and McAfee jointly unveiled a virtual desktop security
product to secure corporate data and applications at the Citrix Synergy conference in Berlin
on Oct. 6.
McAfee's Management
for Optimized Virtualized Environments Antivirus (MOVE AV) will make it
easy for customers to secure corporate data and applications delivered to
virtual desktops, the companies said.
"With the availability of MOVE for hosted virtual desktops, and the
upcoming extension of its capabilities to client-side virtual desktops, our
customers are realizing the benefits of the best-in-class security
capabilities," said Raj Dhingra, group vice president and general manager
with the XenDesktop product group at Citrix.
Available today, MOVE AV is specifically designed for all Citrix XenDesktop
virtual desktops regardless of whether it's running on the server or on a local
client-side virtual machine. It will secure XenDesktop deployments on Citrix
XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.
With traditional desktop computing, security has often been an afterthought,
and in a virtual desktop environment, traditional antivirus created
"serious performance issues," said Chris Wolf, research vice president
at Gartner. "Even for users that booted shared virtual desktop images, the
performance degradation was significant," he said.
According to Wolf, organizations either limited consolidation or delayed virtual
desktop adoption to maintain existing host-based security.
MOVE AV is a "virtualization-aware" centralized service where
intelligence is shared, according to the announcement.
All virus-scanning and virus signature file updates are centralized, which
also offloads the processing-intensive actions from individual virtual
machines. MOVE AV reduces CPU usage, memory and storage requirements, and
simplifies security management.
"McAfee and Citrix are giving customers security that is flexible,
secure and designed to protect virtual desktops and servers without impacting
performance," said Candace Worley, general manager of the endpoint
protection business unit at McAfee.
Under the centralized security management, when MOVE AV encounters malware
on a virtual desktop, it applies a set of defined security policies to remove
the threat. At the same time, it also updates all other supported desktops.
Companies are adopting desktop virtualization to deliver Windows desktops
and applications in a more secure, flexible and cost-effective way to employees
who are increasingly mobile and using their own devices to access corporate
resources, the companies said in a statement.
"When you combine the McAfee MOVE announcement with the Citrix
XenServer IntelliCache announcement, you're giving organizations compelling
reasons to move forward with large-scale client virtualization
initiatives," Wolf said. He said he expects the announcements to "be
a serious catalyst for the desktop virtualization market."
The security product is the first result of joint
collaboration between McAfee and Citrix Systems announced earlier this
year. The collaboration is aimed at making a line of desktop security software
optimized specifically for virtualized environments. This way, enterprises
would not have to choose between providing basic endpoint protection or rolling
out virtual desktops to end users.
The companies plan to move on to the next phase of the collaboration by
integrating security directly into the Citrix XenClient
hypervisor and Citrix XenServer. McAfee's MOVE platform will take advantage of
enhanced hypervisor-native detection capabilities built within those virtual
desktop products.
XenClient will be a core feature of the new XenDesktop
5 announced at the same conference.
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