Outsourcing or Cloud Computing?

It seems to me that cloud computing is much more than taking an organization's desktops and plunking them into an outsourced location and connecting users with a big private pipe between their office's LAN-connected thin or thick clients. Cloud computing means that a user can access the services they need from anywhere via the Internet, without complex infrastructures and support overheads, training and upfront costs.

So let's explore the typical "virtual desktop" business proposition. You build your own desktop server infrastructure or lease it from an "outsource cloud" provider, replace existing PCs with new thin client computers, add a private secure network infrastructure and then continue to manage and support the virtual desktops and the thin clients from your location? It is small wonder this hasn't taken off, and it is not the desktop server capital cost, whether outsourced or not. Perhaps we're missing the compelling reasons for doing this.

A lot of organizations have been studying the cost elements and capital expenditure impact of virtualizing their desktops. What they discovered is that there are a number of reasons why one would virtualize the desktop. The main reasons are reducing maintenance and support costs as well as hardware and energy costs. This leads to the realization that the support costs are a function of the applications that the user utilizes, the users' device complexity, the network infrastructure (VPN, accelerators and firewall management and the mandatory fail-over and disaster recovery) and response time.

To reduce costs and take advantage of desktop virtualization, I need not worry so much about hosting or outsourcing the virtual desktop server, but rather figure out how to eliminate all those new elements these "virtualized desktop servers" require to make those desktops usable. Are we missing something? You bet! The user! It's all about user productivity and mobility. In short, the focus on cost reductions is not buying or leasing a new server, network capacity, or managing new edge devices and forgetting that the whole reason for the PCs was to make end-users as productive as possible. It is enabling employees to service customers effectively, innovate, compete and grow better, faster and cheaper. What this means is the only viable virtual desktop solution is one that provides better capabilities than the user had with their physical desktop and enable them to work better on the road and from home, without requiring any support wherever they work.

Virtual desktop cloud computing means authorized access from anywhere mobility, equal to better than PC accessible multi-media, security of access and data safety using familiar interfaces, and a liquid-computing-like server that intelligently "floats" the end-user desktop to save resources and power, guaranteeing its availability and readiness when the user needs it. If these dimensions are in not the equation, you aren't looking at cloud computing -- you are looking at a virtual server strangely populated with windows images, sitting in a company lab, and you are not going to save CAPEX or OPEX costs, irrespective of any hosting or outsourcing alternative.