The presentation we had on a cloud-based virtual environment was quite interesting. We ended up going for just under two hours on the topic. Lots of technical discussion on how it works, the software choices and issues such as scalability, security, privacy, etc. all came up.

I may just have to sign up for a trial account just to see how it behaves. I’ve seen a number of environments that had this idea over the past 10 years, but this one may be “the one.” The concept is good, the timing is good and the implementation appears to be solid. It has pretty much anything you could want for a small virtual office and it offloads having a desktop support person on site. This is not to say there isn’t room for improvement and extra features, but the foundations appear to be solid and all of the basics are covered.

The URL is http://www.eseri.com/ and it is worth taking a look at.

Everything is based on open source software and it is all accessed via No Machine’s NX client. This provides a lightweight secure access method and the remote desktop is quite responsive. If I remember some tests I did a few years ago with a dial-up link, it was painful but usable at 9600, tolerable at 14.4 and worked pretty good above that.