Accessing Applications In The Cloud, Literally In The Clouds!

I recently took a trip to Chicago for a long weekend getaway this past Memorial Day and had a real "Wow, this is so cool" moment that impressed even me. Working in the tech industry with a constantly innovating cloud provider can sometimes leave you seeing the products that your company offers as the norm. 

However, while traveling this past weekend I had a moment when I was really wowed by the technology and the situation.

Let me describe what happened: 

I was traveling to Chicago and cruising along at 30,000 feet over Wisconsin, counting down the moments until my vacation began and needed to get some work done. I booted up my laptop and connected to my nDesk virtual desktop which allows me to work from anywhere, just like I'm sitting in the office. 

I was working on my nDesk cloud desktop, literally in the clouds. 

Pretty freaking cool! 

WiFi on airplanes is still not terribly reliable so things weren't perfect, but I was able to get my work done just like I was sitting in the office. Think about how this would have happened just a few years ago (Pretending that WiFi existed on planes then). I would have tried to connect through a VPN which would have been excruciating over an airplanes WiFi if it worked at all and would have had to have all my business applications installed on my laptop in order to use them and any time the plane's WiFi dropped out I would have risked losing my work. 

Now with cloud services including hosted applications and desktops I can access my programs and information from anywhere, anytime without the risks of losing my work or data loss even if I don;t have my applications installed on my iPad or local laptop. 

Awesome! No matter where you are, there is no denying the cloud is cool.