ISOLATING VIRTUAL DESKTOP APPLICATIONS FOR POLICY ENFORCEMENT

Some embodiments provide a method of enforcing a set of access policies on traffic exchanged between remote clients and virtual desktop applications. This method receives and stores access policies that define access to different virtual desktop applications by remote clients. To a set of one or more access gateways remote, the method forwards client requests to launch virtual desktop applications. The method analyzes responses provided by the gateway set to virtual desktop requests, and based on this analysis, creates records that identify the virtual applications that will be launched. The method passes the gateway responses back to the remote clients, and upon receiving traffic to the identified virtual applications from the remote clients, (1) uses the created records to identify the virtual applications associated with the received traffic and (2) applies the access policies associated with the identified virtual applications to the received traffic.