I often ask my IT audiences when I speak at events "What is our purpose?" In other words, why do IT people do what they do and get paid for it? The answer is simpler than most people try to make it. Our primary purpose is to support end-user productivity. If we fail at that, then nothing else we do would be of any value and we would be out of jobs. I will admit there is a secondary category that is protecting confidential data (another thing Symantec is really good at). But that would also be moot if there was nothing of value worth protecting.

So what do users need to be productive, and how do we make sure that they have it? I mentioned in the last blog that "the desktop (virtual or otherwise) is the work environment, not the work itself." Think of the desktop as an office you enter to do your work. You want a comfortable chair, good lighting etc., but if you didn't...

Many IT people today think they have a pretty good idea about what virtualization is, and even know some of the companies that sell it.  But perhaps the people that are confused have a better grasp on the situation, because they know that they don’t quite understand it all.  And that can potentially prevent leaping in a direction that does not provide the results you thought it would.  To make it more challenging, many vendors are bringing completely different architectural models to market, so it’s hard to stack rank “feeds and speeds” since in many instances you are evaluating fundamentally different approaches to solving problems.  And these approaches have enormous short and long term implications to all of your infrastructure, some that are yet to be fully vetted.  Let me see if I can help reduce the confusion by explaining a few things about the various virtualization technologies.

Let’s start with the one that I...