I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around the subject of hosted desktops recently. Anyone familiar with Cloud Computing concepts will be well aware of two main cloud computing areas – Software as a Service (something along the lines of Salesforce.com or Google Apps) or Infrastructure as a Service, which is generally considered server infrastructure as a service (think Amazon AWS). AWS is a really, really good IaaS platform, but it’s very server & storage centric. For example, all the standard Amazon AMI’s (machine images) are for server OS’s (Windows 2008 server and the likes).

People are comfortable and familiar with the concepts of having their email or server infrastructure in the cloud, but not so much with the concept of having a desktop in the cloud. What if you had your Windows 7 or Mac OSX instance running in the cloud, available and accessible to you everywhere? Do you see this as being a problem? Are you comfortable with the concept? The same types of questions will arise for cloud desktops as they do for cloud email / storage solutions, namely:

• Is my data secure?
• Who owns my data?
• Can I get my data back / move it if I want to?
• Where is it hosted?
• Who has access to my data?

But, my question is, do you have other concerns about you desktop living in the cloud? All of the above questions I can easily address (and I do every single day!). I can think that network connectivity and latency will be key concerns. But what else? Method of access will be a concern, especially for corporates thinking of moving desktop infrastructure to the cloud. What do they do with all their existing hardware? What do they give their staff going forward, netbooks & thin clients?

And what about cost? In the past few weeks, I have spoken to several companies considering a move to hosted desktop solutions. But cost is a concern and this is something that I’m currently trying to evaluate and understand fully. Is a hosted desktop solution really cheaper in the long run than in-house infrastructure? Sure, you don’t need the capital outlay upfront that say an upgrade in desktop os, or hardware would be, you don’t need to pay for power and maintenance, but you do still need to pay for an access terminal.

And another key question – is hosted desktops really cloud computing? To cloud computing purists, the cloud revolves around SaaS as opposed to IaaS. Is hosted desktops something that is here to stay, or simply a stop gap measure for people until all relevant software can be packaged as a SaaS offering.

I will do a deeper dive into the technical aspects of hosted desktops in the near future, but for now I’m really interested in feedback via comments or email on peoples thoughts on this concept.