Wednesday 30 July 2014

Pros and cons of cloud desktops for business

I think there might be something to the idea of company desktop environments stored in the cloud, as long as they are available offline, too. It obliterates the problems of BYOD policies, because the work environment is secured in the cloud, separate from the hardware. Whether the company or the employee provides the hardware is irrelevant. It neatly separates personal and work environments, even to the point of the preferred operating systems being irrelevant. It assists in remote work, too, because now you don't need to supply remote connection software and support that for everyone. In or out of the office, you're using the same environment with the same capabilities. It also means it's very easy to upgrade or downgrade a user's computer power as needed - you just have to adjust the settings on their cloud desktop.

It does raise some concerns, however. First, cloud desktops are probably going to be slow and frustrating to use, so they'll be worse in that way than local desktops. That's the way most people will care about. Second, it does put an extra burden (or maybe a different burden) on IT support, because now they need to make sure everyone can access the remote desktops from whatever is their host system of choice. That could be a problem. Third, it's harder to trust remote storage for some businesses, especially since government agencies can just wander in and copy the data whenever they want. Storing everything in the cloud is a risk for them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't heard of anyone trying this.
PPS - One big reason would be the huge expense involved at today's rates.

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