Hosted Virtual Desktops are relatively new to the North American I.T. landscape, and have generated quite a bit of buzz recently. This brief and candid document will outline whether an HVD from dinCloud is right for your business.

A dinCloud hosted virtual desktop is a traditional Windows based PC that is delivered from the cloud (a remote, secure data center) leveraging Virtualization technologies, high density computers and storage, and modern Internet and private circuit connections.

• The user downloads a small client on his tablet (ipad or android), traditional PC (newer than 5 years old hopefully) or thin client device or a combination of several devices  – in the case of dinCloud we use a client based on accelerated/optimized RDP (remote desktop protocol, which is the native protocol for Microsoft) – this handles the device interface and connection to the Cloud.
• The dinCloud team has worked in the background to create the customized computing environment using our proprietary tool dinManage to create a Virtual Private Data-Center for our customers. This includes creating the user’s desktops on the backend, provisioning servers that will host the desktop’s applications such as Microsoft Office or SAP, appropriate storage and disaster recovery based on solutions from NetApp and the associated cloud networking and security infrastructure.
• Next the dinCloud team, service provider or customer, migrate the existing data and user information (Active Directory) from the legacy physical or virtual infrastructure to the dinCloud Private cloud.
• The user is then able to connect via an internet browser to their HVD from any device that has been provisioned. dinCloud’s operating system of choice is Microsoft Server that is made to closely resemble the Windows 7 familiar look and feel. This ensures compliance and reduces costs to the customer.

Hosted virtual desktops from dinCloud offer many advantages to traditional desktops but are not a good fit for all users and use cases. Generally speaking business application users with access to high speed internet connections will find the HVD suitable for their needs. Users that focus on graphics, movies, entertainment, CAD, or rich content internet browsing will generally not be happy with their HVD due to limitations imposed by internet bandwidth, underlying infrastructure and latency created by the laws of physics.

dinCloud’s award winning HVD’s offer the following benefits:

• Secure and backed up cloud based storage of your work and documents including disaster recovery
• Secure desktop environment that will meet and exceed the security requirements for HIPPA, PCI and SOX compliance
• Access to the same desktop and document folders from multiple devices such as PC’s and tablets (a great fit for companies that have instituted BYOD – bring your own device) for example a student can log into his desktop on a classroom device and have access to the document exactly where he left it when he goes home at night and uses another device or a doctor can have access to his documents and patient records from the hospital, each patient examination room, his home and the golf course.
• Unlimited storage for tablets and PC’s
• Significantly lower cost of maintenance, management and operational support than traditional PC’s
• Monthly subscription pricing model that eliminates the massive data center and equipment costs for companies wishing to utilize this technology

dinCloud HVD is useful when:

• You primarily use MS office, an ERP application such as SAP or Oracle and other traditional client-server and SAAS based applications
• You want to use the above applications from a tablet
• Certain applications that are client server will show amazing performance increases when the client desktop and server are a few feet away from each other on our 40GB backplane

The dinCloud HVD is not a good fit for the following use cases:

• You spend the majority of your time on a plane or without access to a high speed internet connection.  (Office 365 is now cloud friendly) and supports cloud licensing as well as hard drive based Office giving you the ability to use off-line
• Your work is content creation such as multimedia, CAD, or the Adobe suite of products
• You have a low-speed internet connection
• You want to play video games on your hosted virtual desktop
• You want to view content rich internet sites from your HVD such as CNN or any other rich content (to be perfectly clear - Internet browsing can be quite painful from the HVD – but there is a solution) see below

Your primary work location is outside of the U.S. or somewhere 1000’s of hops from our secure data centers in the U.S. (it will work, just a little slow) Since we all prefer to take advantage of the rich content available on the internet we have found that a hybrid HVD solution works best, where your internet browsing is done from your traditional native PC or tablet device and your business is done inside the HVD. All you have to do to work like this is minimize the HVD window and use your browser of choice that shipped with your pc or tablet. When you are ready to get back to work you click on the HVD icon and your cursor will be flashing exactly where you left it inside your document. In fact a meteor could strike you PC or tablet while you were in the middle of drafting your personal manifesto in Word (unsaved naturally) and you would not lose any of your work. You would simply go to your alternate device and log in and the cursor would be exactly where you left off.