As we become more and more accustomed to storing and accessing information via the cloud, it’s likely that we’ll see increased pressures on IT departments to help manage, control and facilitate employees’ access to information – not just on their work stations, but on any number of personal and company computing devices. According to Punima Padmanabhan, Vice President of Products for MokaFive, desktop virtualization will help address what she sees as a growing trend, BYOC – Bring Your Own Computer. And while virtual desktop solutions aren’t new, MokaFive is evangelizing their platform-agnostic solution for client-side, rather than server-side implementation.
Spurred in part by the rising popularity of personal smartphones, more and more employees want to be able to utilize their own computing devices – phones, netbooks, laptops – in lieu of company-issued ones. “Knowledge workers don’t want to be locked down,” says Padmanabhan, arguing that more and more employees want to have the flexibility to choose the hardware they use at work, and in some cases, use their own computing devices rather than company-issued ones.
But this raises a lot of questions for IT: security, software installation and updates, support requests.
MokaFive’s flagship product MokaFiveSuite addresses many of these issues, allowing IT departments to manage the delivery of secure virtual environments. Called LivePC, these images run locally, so end-users download a secure virtual desktop that can be run on any computer – Windows or Mac – and that can also be launched from a mobile device or USB stick. Updates and patches can be made to a single golden image that MokaFive can distribute to each LivePC. The product allows on- and offline access, as well as a single-button recovery from viruses and malware.
MokaFive recently received $21 million in Series C funding, with investment from NGEN Partners, Khosla Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. Competitors include Citrix, RingCube and vThere.
