Amazon WorkSpaces Cloud Desktop Service Now Offers Hourly Pricing

AWS has introduced a new way to consume its Amazon WorkSpaces cloud desktop service: desktops by the hour. The new service is designed to appeal to businesses with employees needing only occasional computer access and should allow many customers to reduce their costs, although buyers will need to pay close attention to how the service is …

Chrome OS: From Education to the Enterprise

In less than four years, Google has completely overturned the educational computing market. In 2012, Chromebook sales were less than 1% of all devices shipped within the K–12 education market. By the end of 2013, shipments had increased to 25%. In May of this year, Chrome OS device sales (Chromebook and Chromebox) passed 50% of …

Cloud Providers Still Claiming DaaS Immune to Malware

When VDI and DaaS were first introduced, many claims were made for their superiority over distributed desktops. They were cheaper, faster, more secure, easier to manage, etc. At the time, with few exceptions, these claims were no more than fantasy. Over the last few years, though, sufficient improvements in the core platforms and underlying infrastructure have …

Deploying Amazon WorkSpaces at Scale

I’ve made no secret of my dissatisfaction with Amazon’s WorkSpaces DaaS platform. While I like the general direction in which the platform is heading, and appreciate the impact that Amazon can have in the DaaS market, WorkSpaces has been slow to implement enterprise-class management features and suffers from too many rough edges to withstand close …