Amazon announced “Workspaces”, a brand new fully managed cloud desktop environment, built on Windows 7. (Article).
It is a very compelling offer for SMB’s for several reasons.
Some Major Benefits
- Cost points are monthly and NOT their usual hourly rate. This is far easier to budget.
- Their client to connect to the server has full multi-monitor support and is install-able on nearly every platform, ranging from Desktops (Mac/Windows) to mobile devices (iPhone/Android). (Source )
- Instances are managed by and admin account and can be completely integrated into an existing Active Directory network.
- Complexity of instance setup is removed. They used the default storage of persistent storage
- Full host of synchronization tools for the cloud workstation and any local backup network
In the past, these types of headless services required specialized hardware for either the client or server and/or fairly high licensing fees.
Amazon seems to have pulled an “Apple”, in simplifying the process greatly, but unlike Apple, they’ve created a very reasonable entry price point.
All Amazon would need to do at this point is create a boot-able dongle of some sort, that could be inserted into an older workstation, rebooted and have the workstation instantly connect to the cloud computer. While this would be devastating to computer hardware suppliers, this would be a boon to SMB’s in that they could re-provision their older workstations instantly.
Very interesting interesting technology market development.
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