What do you think about Desktop as a Service ("DaaS")?

I’ve been testing out a 7-day trial account from Desktone. They offer ‘desktop as a service’ for organisations looking to virtualise their end user operations. They describe themselves as ‘the industry’s only cloud-hosted VDI’.

I really like the concept of sticking everything in the cloud. I do it as much as I can with all my business operations and it makes working anywhere incredibly smooth. If I’ve got an internet connection, I’m good. Unless, of course, I’m working at a location where the internet is regulated, controlled or restricted for a multitude of ridiculous purposes.

Thames Water has chosen ‘desktop as a service’ from Desktone and their service integrator, Molten Technologies. The concept being that every single employee’s desktop experience will be moved to Desktone’s servers, to be accessed and managed from there.

This should — if Thames Water have allowed it — enable employees to log in to their work environment from any computer (Windows or Mac) and from any iPad or iPhone. All of a sudden it means you can use your home laptop or your personal iPad to get work done.

I operate on Macs, most of the time, but I have to say, I’m not really wedded to them. I do like how slim the MacBook Air is. I really enjoy the Mac experience, but in terms of getting stuff done, I would rather have the flexibility of working anywhere,

For a long while I used a dedicated server (£59/month) from one of the UK hosting firms to act as a DropBox backup. A backup of a backup, if you like. I use it almost like a desktop and that worked rather nicely. I didn’t have a lot of apps installed on it though — e.g. Office — which made things a little complicated to do anything other than Gmail.

Since so much of my work life is now cloud-based (Google Apps, WordPress, DropBox, Twitter, and so on) I wonder how I would get on if I converted to a Desktone VDI instance fully?

I’m giving it some thought.

I’ve no idea how much it costs — there’s no information on the Desktone site. I doubt their aiming for me as a customer. They’ll want the big, big companies.

I’d be willing to pay something like £50/month for a fully backed-up, fully managed, ‘fully everything’ wicked desktop-in-the-cloud.

What’s your view?

(You can get your own 7-day trial of Desktone here.)