Corporate World excited about desktops in the cloud

by
in internet on (#3F2)
The folks at "Talking Cloud" (who are coming at the subject from an obvious bias) point out that corporations are looking more and more at a corporate desktop environment where desktops are in the Cloud.

With more and more users needing access to traditional Windows applications inside the corporate firewall, the rise of Desktop-as-a-Service may be the future for your average worker bee.
Reply 9 comments

Yes, because ... (Score: 5, Interesting)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 00:34 (#8R)

... thin clients worked out so well the last 50 times they became a corporate fad.

Mainframe / thin client model? (Score: 5, Insightful)

by epitaxial@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 01:13 (#8T)

Did someone who was born in 1990 come up with this idea? Every so often somebody discovers this "new" idea.

Re: Mainframe / thin client model? (Score: 5, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 05:34 (#8V)

Here is a cool article (from 1968!) describing this what-is-old-is-new-again phenomenon and how it relates to display processors.

It's more relevant for the current X Window / Wayland efforts than full desktop virtualization, but it always gives me a chuckle how such things never seem to change.

Re: Mainframe / thin client model? (Score: 1)

by link@pipedot.org on 2014-03-04 06:49 (#97)

Regarding the cycle, modern smartphones are already more powerful than mainframes of ancient times, and they don't look like they will be getting less powerful so it's more a matter of how we use them.

As long as we are constrained by the speed of light, latency can be an issue, connectivity is also a problem so people are going to want a computer+data with them.

Until brain-computer interfaces become much better I think there'll be a market for PCs (whether laptops or desktops) - since they can be a lot more powerful and capable. Smartphones on the other hand might lose significant share to wearables once the latter start augmenting people in many ways a phone can't. Telekinesis/telepathy/eidetic memory/video-audio recognition would be more seamless with a wearable than a phone- it's the difference between someone seemingly doing autistic savant/magical stuff and someone using a phone to do them.

But central servers still aren't going to go away either - search, etc. Maybe the Tor chat thing will start mass adoption of "P2P" messaging and other stuff. Given the slow adoption of IPv6 I doubt Tor will scale to billions of users and remain "decentralized"- the NSA may run the mega/giganodes ;).

Central Point of Failure (Score: 4, Informative)

by scott@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 06:19 (#8W)

I'd rather not have a huge central point of failure. The mail server is enough, thank you!

Re: Central Point of Failure (Score: 2, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 12:09 (#8Z)

That article from 1968 was spectacular! As I wrote on comp.misc, I'm a fan "in theory" of the centralized computing model. Certainly it makes maintenance and admin easier, reduces the chances that some employee will leave your customer database in a strip club/bar, etc. But I have worked for most of the last 10 years in Africa on some really awful bandwidth connections, and here it would be a non-starter.

It's a reminder to me you need resiliency and backup and all this cloud horsesh*t doesn't provide either. If your desktops are in the cloud, one busted telephone line that takes down your ADSL connection buys you a snow day. It just doesn't work.

Personally, I'm still on the "keep the servers in house" bandwagon, because at work they migrated us all to Office365 cloud solution by Microsoft, and it's been pretty imperfect. We've even had some trouble with things like wrong certs blocking access, etc., it's been a hassle and I'm not happy with it.

It's great! (Score: 5, Insightful)

by spallshurgenson@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 15:34 (#91)

Desktops in the cloud are great!

... Except when the network is down. Then nobody can do anywork at all.
... or when the cloud provider suddenly goes belly up, leaving you stranded.
... or when the cloud gets hacked, and all your corporate secrets get stolen
... or when a government secretly requests those same secrets for the benefit of its corporations
... or when the cloud provider sells or uses for its own benefit those corporate secrets
... or when the provider suddenly changes the infrastructure, leaving you with a product that no longer suits your need
... or when existing infrastructure didn't meet all existing requirements to begin with, forcing you to kludge together some sort of workaround
... or when the provider increases the price year by year until the savings that going to the cloud initially brought you have vanished.

Yeah, but aside from all that, desktop clouds are great!

Who's Cloud (Score: 2)

by tempest@pipedot.org on 2014-03-03 16:30 (#92)

"A great end user experience across any device".

What device has a good desktop experience other than an actual desktop? I find it hard to believe corporations are excited about any form of desktop, and most companies I know of are happier to be rid of them and certainly aren't concerned about replicating the desktop experience on other things. (Isn't that what Microsoft always wanted with their Pocket PC line which was never popular?)

employees in the cloud (Score: 1)

by eviljim@pipedot.org on 2014-03-05 03:50 (#9K)

I'm waiting until I can purchase employees in the cloud too, that way my office link going down wouldn't affect productivity and the data center can manage all that HR crap.