While explicit, the claim that "...all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected and disclosed to...government, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of government agencies, both domestic and foreign." in our opinion sounds simply draconian. Add the fact that now there is an agent sitting on every single machine under this privacy policy, the question is, how will this fly by any company's legal department?

The good news is that if no one reads this screen, cares about privacy or worries about security risks created by agents on every single endpoint, then the software can be used for free to perform a VDI assessment for up to 45 days.

Update (December 21, 2010)

After this blog post went live, Quest promptly responded by saying that this "is the same verbiage you get in the Liquidware Stratusphere product on which Quest VDI Assessment is based" and promised to remove it. Hugh McEnvoy, Product Manager for Quest VDI Assessment, goes further by saying "there is nothing 'secret' in this stuff", referring to the data collected.

At Lanamark, we beg to differ. All data collected within a customer's environment, especially about users, is secret and allowing a statement such as the one above to fly under the radar raises another question: how confident is Quest about what is happening in Stratusphere "under the hood"?

Update 2 (December 21, 2010)

And now Liquidware Labs responded to Alessandro's blog post, saying "any commercial product that goes as in-depth for assessment and user experience monitoring should carry a disclaimer warning about how the data is gathered." Let's set the record straight:

1. Lanamark Suite doesn't use agents
Instead, it leverages standard OS instrumentation to collect all the necessary data. Stratusphere requires agents because it is a Linux-based virtual appliance that cannot otherwise interface with standard Windows operating system instrumentation.

2. Lanamark Suite doesn't touch the data on target systems
There is no interception, inspection, copying of data on / from target systems or packets to / from these systems. Based on the original disclaimer from Liquidware Labs, it is probably fair to assume that this is not the case with Stratusphere.

3. Lanamark doesn't disclose the data
Only the Lanamark partner delivering desktop transformation services to end customers can access the data collected by Lanamark. There is no disclosure of data to "government, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of government agencies, both domestic or foreign." Also, the product name "Stratusphere" seems to imply that the data is going outside the "Troposphere" of client environments into the "Stratosphere" (and beyond perhaps).

Source: Commission for Environmental Cooperation of North America

One of the most common concerns customers have is whether agents will be installed on target systems. Some customers, particularly ones in defense, healthcare and financial services sectors, will not allow agent-based data collection to be performed. Lanamark is the only ISV that provides desktop optimization and virtualization planning software that is agent-less, ensuring privacy, security and compliance of desktop infrastructure.

Then of course there is Liquidware Labs, which wants everyone to believe that its software does not use agents, when in reality it does. If you are a customer, don't let anyone convince you to install intrusive agents on your endpoints. Doing so can not only jeopardize user experience, performance and compliance of all monitored systems, but also expose these systems to data theft, malware and other security risks. You are much better off working with a Lanamark partner using Lanamark Suite.