application virtualisation

For situations where client mobility is important, it is actually possible to stream the whole of an application onto the client device. Once done, the client device can be disconnected from the server but still run the application. This is Application Virtualisation. Clearly in this situation, a true Thin Client would not have the processing power to run the software but for mobile users, the device of choice would be a laptop. It is important to note that the application is not installed on the laptop. It is virtualised meaning that it is encapsulated in its own software bubble (in fact just a group of files) which can be transported to any computing device (security policies set by IT will probably restrict this). The data in use by the application (in our example Word documents) will now be out of synch with the files on the network. So when the laptop is next connected, files get re-synchronised.

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Wikipedia: application virtualisation
2DeCipher: application virtualisation