The Other Side of Remote Working

One of the fre­quently touted ingredi­ents of Web 2.0 is the idea of the “web as platform”, and providing software as a service. In some respects, this isn’t a new thing at all. I got pitched the idea of using an ASP (applic­a­tion service provider) for the first time in 2000. Citrix was founded in 1989 — before the web existed — and its Metaframe products to provide remote desktops over the Internet have been around since the late 90s. Historically, internet con­nec­tion speeds haven’t been fast enough for enough of us for such products to be of much interest. However, that’s def­in­itely changed over the last couple of years.

Today, I’ve been playing around with the Citrix remote desktop service from Extrasys, a UK provider. You buy it on a sub­scrip­tion basis, depending on number of seats, software require­ments and other service elements such as renting thin clients (very basic com­puters that basic­ally act as an internet con­nec­tion). In many respects, there isn’t a great deal to say or do, because you simply get a copy of Windows delivered over the net, which won’t seem very glam­orous, new or exciting compared to the pretty cre­ations from flickr, etc.

But from a small business per­spective, these services make a lot of sense. The main benefits, as I see them, are:

Cost-​​savings — you only need thin clients in the office — they’re cheaper and consume less power — and license fees for software will be lower when bought through an ASP.
Total Cost of Ownership — there’s no addi­tional support costs or depre­ci­ating hardware, and you don’t need an IT manager.
Speed and Versatility — you can work anywhere you have an internet con­nec­tion; new work­sta­tions can be added instant­an­eously.
Security — your small business probably doesn’t have a RAID array, air filters or daily offsite backups; it doesn’t matter (from the IT per­spective) if you lose your laptop or your office gets broken into — there’s nothing on the machines anyway.

What are the down­sides? Not being able to work without an internet con­nec­tion (trains and planes are starting to become so annoying in this respect!). There’s also an (illusory) sense of less security because your con­fid­en­tial doc­u­ments are in someone else’s care, which is unnerving to many, though irrational.

Given that security will be an objec­tion, Extrasys provide a two-​​step authen­tic­a­tion. As well as the normal ID and password, you get a little plastic widget that provides a single-​​use passcode that’s tied to your User ID for every log-​​on. It looks like this:

One other caveat, the service wasn’t quite as fast as I’d like over my 2mb broad­band con­nec­tion. There was a notice­able delay as I typed, or when resizing windows. Not as fast as using Writely, for example. Not sure why this was. I’ll keep trying for a couple of days and amend this post if things speed up.

Given that this sort of solution was invented years ago, is it Web 2.0? I’d argue yes. A lot of what we’re seeing in Web 2.0 on the tech­nical level was possible years ago, if only we’d had the con­nec­tion speeds and the people to use them.

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