Cloud computing? [closed]

Question

I'm an analyst and intermediate programmer working for a consulting company. Sometimes we are doing some intensive computing in Excel which can be frustrating because we have slow computers. My company does not have enough money to buy everyone new computers right now.

Is there a cloud computing service that allows me to login to a high performance virtual computer from remote desktop? We are not that technical so preferrably the computer is running Windows and I can run Excel and other applications from this computer.

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm not sure because I've never use any DaaS providers, but if if it's something you only do "Sometimes" you might find it cheaper just to buy just one high spec'd PC and set it up on an empty desk and allow people to remote desktop/vnc into it as required.

We do this for FEA, which is computationally very heavy and takes a long time to run (often several days). This way it doesn't tie up user's PCs.

Answer 2

You are probably looking for DaaS providers. Google turned up http://www.desktone.com/daas/index.php as DaaS providers. I am not sure how good they are though.

Answer 3

Amazon provides a service EC2 (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/). You can run a virtual machine on their cloud and you pay for the space to store it and the time it's running.