This is going to be big for Chromebooks, I suspect.
Dumb Terminals are great for working environments and we should have never left them.
Ya, just put it on Amazon's servers instead. That's way better.
Well, yes you can, you just document the procedure.
I really can't understand the disconnect between setting a policy that you can't have company data on company owned/controlled desktops but can have all that data sitting in a 3rd party system.
I've got a free year of credit monitoring because a hospital laptop was stolen with patient data on it and they have no idea where it went. Yippee.
But whatever, just hope that Amazon does the right thing, it's not like you or your healthcare provider can check up on it.
When a single system is cheaper (counting total ROI) than distributed systems, the mainframe approach will win. Otherwise, the distributed approach will win. The tradeoffs change from year to year and even company to company.
PS -- internal web apps are essentially dumb terminals as well, and businesses have been making those since the late 90s.
VMware's DaaS has been available since earlier this month - http://www.vmware.com/products/daas