Desktop Hosting

What is Desktop Hosting?

Many companies have found benefits in Desktop Computing, placing desktops, applications, and images for the end-user systems on centralized servers. The basic reasons for this move are to maintain performance, simplify management and maintain security. Desktop Hosting is an alternative available to businesses and organizations to obtain the functionality of Desktop Computing and eliminate the purchasing, maintenance, and pain of providing an Information Technology infrastructure for the applications. It is a specific means of fproviding Software as a Service (SaaS).

In the hosted environment, the user organizations do not need to invest in capital projects, find qualified support personnel, dealing with the project implementation nuances of implementing Information Technology systems, or resolving the usual issues that crop up with IT systems. These are the responsibility of the hosting provider.

Desktop Hosting Characteristics

The applications are available on a monthly subscription and users are added or reduced based on the company need. Thus an organization has a predictable expense (or savings – if less capacity is needed) based on their staffing requirements. Organizations can utilize applications at remote offices and with 'work at home' employees. Many business continuity and disaster recovery features are included by the hosting provider (these are often overlooked until that moment when they are needed). An often underappreciated characteristic is that the hosting provider uses world class supporting processes (redundancy, antivirus software to name a few) that can be expensive to operate and beyond the financial means and technical skills of many small businesses. Since the hosting provider provides the services to many clients the cost per user can actually be lower than the cost of organization build and maintained systems.
An often overlooked characteristic is data security. Desktop Hosting data resides on centralized high availability servers. Thus no software needs to be pre-installed with the user device and no data needs to be stored on local hard drives or portable storage devices.

See Features and Benefits for additional information.
See Application Hosting for specific user applications.
See On-Premise Solutions for information about hosting on-site.