Organisational preparedness for hosted virtual desktops in the context of digital forensics

Virtualization in computing has progressed to an extent where desktops can be virtualized and accessed from anywhere. The server hosted model has already surpassed 1% market share of the worldwide professional PC market, with estimates indicating that this is a rapidly growing area. This paper investigates the adequacy of current digital forensic procedures on hosted virtual desktops (HVDs) as there does not appear to be specific methods of locating and extracting evidences from this infrastructure. A hosted virtual desktop deployed in private clouds was simulated to reflect two different computer crime scenarios. It was found that current digital forensic procedures may not be adequate for locating and extracting evidence, since the infrastructure introduces complications such as persistent/non-persisted disk modes and segregating data in a multi-tenant environment.