Why Your Desktop Should Be Born In The Cloud

By Terry Cronin, VP, Cloud Services Division, Toshiba

Technology historians tell us that the idea of cloud computing dates back to at least the mid-’90s. That may be true, but the term’s more likely been in vogue since Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud hit the market 10 years later. In the years since, there’s been a steady and ever-growing migration to this model.

Still, in our business, a decade is eternity. That’s why what we should really be talking about is the next logical next step: solutions that don’t have to migrate to the cloud because they were actually born there.

That’s the best way to look at virtual desktop service (VDS), or Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). At its core, this involves the outsourcing of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to a third-party service provider. And putting the multiple acronyms aside for a moment, it’s a discipline that offers significant opportunities to managed services providers.

First, a little bit of context. On a macro scale, the economy seems to be stabilizing. According to research firm IDC, worldwide IT spending for 2014 will grow 5 percent year-over-year to $2.1 trillion. Cloud-specific spending in particular will spike by 25 percent to more than $100 billion.

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