Amazon's WorkSpaces brings the cloud to enterprise users

AMAZON Web Services (AWS) has always been a big player in the bits and bolts deep in the back-end data centre space, but the cloud giant is moving up the value chain and may soon start streaming your PC to you.

Andy Jassy, senior vice-president of AWS took to the stage last week during the company's developer conference in Las Vegas to announce a new service called WorkSpaces.

The product will see the company supplying virtual desktops to end-user enterprises, run and managed off Amazon's sprawling clouds all over the world. A virtual desktop differs from the regular PC, in that the virtual instance exists on a server elsewhere, not on the PC itself. The user's PC acts as a window through which the desktop image is accessed. This marks quite the radical step in the direction of taking over more of a company's IT resources, because AWS' main play has always been in the infrastructure space.