What is Application Virtualization?

What is Application Virtualization?

Application Virtualization is a virtualization technology, where the required applications are hosted and published in a data center, and are relayed as mere images to the end-user devices to capture actions (keystrokes and mouse actions) back to the application. From the user’s perspective, the application behaves like it would if it were native to the user’s device and the end-user has a seamless experience.

Benefits of Application Virtualization

Application virtualization enables applications to run in environments that do not suit the native application. Some of the benefits of Application Virtualization are:

• Application Isolation :With desktop virtualization, employees use remote devices/thin clients that work on different operating systems. Application Virtualization helps applications become device-independent and enables data communication between heterogeneous networks. It also helps businesses that rely on older applications that aren’t compatible with the latest version of the server operating systems.
• Reduced Costs :Virtualization helps remove the hardware restrictions that the applications generally have. The number of physical servers and data centers can be reduced thus reducing the cost of ownership. Application virtualization also helps organizations cut down operating costs.
• Maintenance :App Virtualization makes the life of an IT admin easy. He or she needs to install or update the application in the server, rather than multiple desktops. The IT admins can also manage the access permissions to the applications. For instance, if a user’s access to an application has to be revoked, the IT admin can do it from the backend, without making any changes to the user’s desktop/ device.
• Data Security :Users access the virtual applications from their devices (mobiles or thin clients). However, if the device gets damaged or stolen, the application data stays on the server (which is complimented by a secure environment including SSL encryption, firewall and SSL gateway) and cannot be accessed by anyone else without the authentication.