JON HONEYBALL
“Being able to log in to your cloud VM session from a generic piece of hardware is a dream for IT managers”
Expert advice from our panel of professionals
Why Microsoft’s new mini PC isn’t a bad deal, a reader rides to the rescue and a slow “exodi” from two of the world’s biggest social media platforms
Jon Honeyball Opinion on Windows, Apple and everything in between – p108
Lee Grant Tales from the front line of computer repair – p111
Olivia Whitcroft Lawyer Olivia offers legal advice for the tech industry – p116
Davey Winder Keeping small businesses safe since 1997 – p118
Steve Cassidy The wider vision on cloud and infrastructure – p122
As we slide into a new year, it’s always good to take stock of how we do things, and whether they’re actually best aligned with our needs.
Let’s start in the enterprise space, because there are changes happening here that are hard to ignore. These days, corporates love to run their normal line of business applications on Azure and to use Office 365 as a standard platform. Some services can be hosted on other platforms, notably AWS, especially for tools provided by a third party. But Azure has built up very strong traction, and the deep integration with Office 365 can’t be ignored.
Windows, as a desktop platform, has been brought into this realm by the deployment and management tools that Microsoft offers. And it really is almost a no-brainer for those companies that want Office 365, Teams, Outlook and so forth in a wholly managed environment.
The chink in the armour has always been Windows itself. About a year ago, I looked at the new cloud-hosted Windows 365 offering, where you can run your Windows session on a cloud server. I ran it for some months, and it was incredibly easy to use and configure. At the time it was Windows 10, but Windows 11 has come along in the meantime. You simply choose the size of virtual machine you need (CPUs, RAM, storage) and it’s built on the fly for you. There’s no “shut down” per se, but the VM is put into hibernation when you aren’t connected to it. It’s “just there” when you do. And Microsoft is responsible for keeping it updated, managed and so forth, with you applying your policy settings through the usual Office 365-style portal.
Although useful, I wasn’t using it on a day-to-day basis, so I shut it down, knowing I could revive the capability in minutes if required. Running it from a browser or RDP client is simple enough, but still feels like you’re wallpapering the hallway via the letterbox.