In a similar move to the Citrix-McAfee alliance earlier this year, Virtual Computer and global IT security firm Sophos have announced a global alliance to proactively safeguard virtual environments from suspicious activity, viruses, and other malware threats.

The virtual desktop market is still in its infancy, and one of the challenges holding VDI back from its anticipated breakout is security. Virtualization giants like Citrix, Trend Micro, and VMware are going about security in new and interesting ways, but startups like Virtual Computer have managed to beat them to the punch.

While Citrix and VMware were talking about creating a Type-1 bare-metal client hypervisor, Virtual Computer was already delivering on that promise. NxTop, Virtual Computer's flagship solution, provides desktop IT administrators the ability to create flexible, dependable, and secure endpoints for various combinations of laptops, desktops, VDI, or cloud computing. And the company wants to make them as secure as possible.

Now with their new partnership, Virtual Computer and Sophos have broken the safeguarding of virtual environments into a two-phase integration process. In the first phase, the companies are providing what they call secure, self-cleaning desktops.

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Read the rest of this InfoWorld Virtualization Report article here.