Microsoft is getting ready to add a D to the aaS revolution. Desktop as a Service with their Windows Virtual Desktop. 

On the average day, you grab a cup of coffee, go to your computer, boot it up, watch all your desktop icons pop up and smile when the family Christmas photo that you set as your desktop background appears.

Like other aaS products, there seems to be a ton of upside. State of the art technology, top notch cyber security, redundancy out the aaS and unlimited portability. You can bring your desktop up in the business center at a hotel in Tahiti, on your tablet at the community pool when it’s your day to watch the kids and on Mom’s 1998 IBM ThinkPad running Windows XP when you’re visiting for the holidays.

Sounds like a winner and it may be. But what happens to the old, third party software we’ve all been running on our desktops for years? The ten year old version of Dreamweaver that still delivers or the four year old Corel Draw software that we know and love and have no desire or need to upgrade because it still does everything we need it to do.

No problem, just put the CD in and upload it to your new DaaS. Except the CD’s are long gone. Probably lost in the last move. Or the move before that. So now we have to upgrade to the latest and greatest version and probably have to pay for a cloud-based subscription with bells and whistles we don’t need or want.

In the old days, computer users were hard-wired to a mainframe computer. You’d sit at a terminal – a dummy terminal – punch in commands and the mainframe, located in the same building, would do all the work. Back then, as long as the lights were on, there was no problem.

DaaS in the cloud creates a stratosphere of problems for any company that is now totally dependent on their Internet connection. That old mainframe could be fired up by a gas fueled generator and production continues. With DaaS, network performance issues can bring a company to its knees.

DaaS also creates a problem for Internet Service Providers. It’s still a new technology, but it’s our opinion that Desktop as a Service is going to make bandwidth less important. If everything is in the cloud. If data isn’t flowing up and down. If it’s only commands that are being transmitted, businesses using DaaS are going to see a significant decrease in the amount of bandwidth that they use and need. The other problem for ISP’s is that latency is going to be the premium service that companies look for in an Internet service.

So as much as redundancy is a positive in the network world, we still hate to be redundant when we stress how important it is to have a network performance monitoring system in place that works for your company.