14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to dominate the online world. During its second re:Invent conference, the company unveiled a new cloud service, WorkSpaces, a virtual desktop service running on AWS.
The idea is to give customers the ability to manage and remotely connect to virtual Windows desktops, running on Amazon's cloud infrastructure.
Amazon boasts that this approach saves businesses a truckload of money, since they don't need on-premise servers, administrators, network infrastructure, and so on.
"Enterprise IT has been engaged in a balancing act in order to meet the needs of a diverse and enlightened user base. They must protect proprietary corporate data while giving employees the ability to work whenever and wherever they want, while using the desktop or mobile device of their choice," Amazon explains.
"Our new Amazon WorkSpaces product gives Enterprise IT the power to meet this challenge head-on. You, the IT professional, can now provision a desktop computing experience in the cloud for your users," the company adds.
"Your users can access the applications, documents, and intranet resources that they need to get their job done, all from the comfort of their desktop computer, laptop, iPad, or Android tablet," it says.
It's all managed by Amazon, and clients can connect either via a tablet or desktop app or even a regular desktop browser. For $35 (€26) a month, you get a single CPU, 3.75 GB of RAM, and 50 GB of storage. For $60 (€45) you get two CPUs, 7.5 GB of RAM, and 100 GB of storage, which should be more than enough for most office tasks.
As far as software is concerned, clients get Windows Server 2008 R2, but customized for desktop use rather than server tasks, along with Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, the Java Runtime Environment, and other apps. For $15 (€11.1) more per month, you can also get Microsoft Office and the Trend Micro antivirus.