Deduplication of endpoint images
AssigneeSophos Limited
InventorsNeil Robert Tyndale Watkiss, Jonathan Francis Caine, Timothy Rayment
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A threat management facility for an enterprise provides security services to a number of virtual compute instances executing on a remote cloud computing platform. In order to prevent or reduce an accumulation of records for abandoned compute instances, each new virtual compute instance is explicitly identified by a user (and optionally a template), and then compared to existing records to identify possible redundancies, which can be deleted or otherwise managed.
Claims20
A computer program product embodied in a non-transitory computer readable medium that, when executing on one or more computing devices, performs the steps of:
- detecting a request from a compute instance in a virtual desktop infrastructure to join an enterprise network managed by a threat management facility;
- creating a virtual machine identifier that identifies the compute instance based on a combination of a template used to create the compute instance and a user logged in to the compute instance;
- creating a first session token to identify a network session with the compute instance;
- comparing the virtual machine identifier to a set of records of virtual machine identifiers;
- in response to the comparing determining that the virtual machine identifier does not appear in any record in the set of records adding the virtual machine identifier and the first session token as an entry in the set of records;
- in response to the comparing determining that the virtual machine identifier appears in the set of records with a second session token deduplicating the compute instance by merging instances of the virtual machine identifier into a single record;
- and
- managing security services for the compute instance with the threat management facility.
A method comprising:
- detecting a request from a compute instance in a virtual desktop infrastructure for services of a threat management facility for an enterprise network;
- comparing a virtual machine identifier associated with a user and a template for the compute instance to a set of records of virtual machine identifiers stored by the threat management facility;
- and
- in response to locating a record of the virtual machine identifier in a record in the set of records with a different session token than the request, facilitating a deduplication of the compute instance in the set of records.
A system for managing security for cloud-based virtual machines, the system comprising:
- a user device operated by a user;
- a virtual desktop infrastructure configured to instantiate virtual machines for an enterprise using a template, the virtual desktop infrastructure configured to create a compute instance based on the templates in response to a request from the user on the user device;
- and
- a threat management facility configured to manage security for the enterprise, the threat management facility further configured to receive a second request for security services from the compute instance and to deduplicate any concurrent records of one or more other compute instances being managed by the threat management facility that have been created by the virtual desktop infrastructure for the user based on the template.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.