Desktops take flight
You can already get your music, applications, servers and storage from the cloud, and now comes the desktop. But not everyone is convinced.
These days a large swathe of the IT industry is pushing "[something]-as-a-service" under the umbrella of cloud computing. For example, you can get infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from companies like Amazon and software-as-a-service (SaaS) from players like Google or Salesforce. Essentially, instead of having the technology physically located in your data centre or on your own device, it is housed in someone else's data centre and delivered to you over a network. Now, the industry is gearing up to do the same for desktop-as-a-service (DaaS).
But unlike the mature cloud offerings desktop in the cloud remains embryonic and faces an uphill battle for acceptance, especially those delivered from a public cloud.
In one sign of the emerging interest in DaaS, four local providers - ZettaGrid, VoIP, Ethan Group and Cloud Central - were successful in being included on a list of IT suppliers to federal government agencies.
