Filtering supported USB devices

In some circumstances, you might not want to allow users to have the ability to plug in external USB devices and redirect them to their virtual desktop machine. The question is whether you allow users to plug USB devices into their physical desktops?

Horizon View has a feature that can prevent USB devices from being redirected to the user's VDI desktop. You can apply this using a policy on the endpoint device, the virtual desktop, or by means of an Active Directory Group Policy. For example, your organization might want to prevent USB memory sticks from being used, as this would give the user the ability to copy data from the virtual desktop machine (one of the reasons for the deployment of VDI is so that data is centralized and doesn't leave the data center).

You can create specific filters to include devices (by the manufacturer or by device type) that you want to allow, but block all others. So, if you have a corporate, standard-type device, it will be allowed. You could even go to the next level and choose a specific model of a device while blocking any other devices, even though they are from the same vendor.