scope:

Purpose & Scope

Virtual desktop services enable enterprise IT organizations to logically centralize desktop resources so as to reduce desktop management costs and support any-device, any-network access to desktops by end-users. The emergence of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure as a service additionally allows enterprise IT organizations to take advantage of cloud resources instead of building their own infrastructures. As a result, enterprises can further reduce IT costs.

This document describes the virtual desktop (VD) requirements for enterprise services and specifies a federation framework for deploying VD services across multiple networks and administrative domains. In particular, the framework allows cloud service providers to host VD services for enterprises and at the same time maintain seamless network connectivity to enterprise resources. For the sake of end-user experience, it is essential that VD sessions can be transparently moved between data centers or between service providers without compromising security and isolation. Such transparent migration of VD session poses significant requirements on the underlying networks, which are also addressed by this document.