Don't put your users in the cloud, Mrs Worthington

Just spent some time talking to AppSense -- this is a company that reckons it's virtualising users. Apart from the fact that this sounds highly uncomfortable -- would you like to be abstracted from your underlying hardware? -- I'm wondering if this isn't an idea that's too far ahead of its time.

According to the company's John Wallace, AppSense is starting to sell user virtualisation into enterprises and cloud providers, with the idea that enterprises will start to virtualise end users, and push end-user data, all the personalisations, profiles, applications, OS images, the lot, into a data centre somewhere. Someone else's datacentre.

Clear advantages claimed are the usual ones: access from anywhere, seamless, common experience no matter what hardware the user is running, management control over what the user can download and plonk onto the corporate network etc. And I'm sure the technology is pretty good: the company sounds like it's thought it through; it's convinced Goldman Sachs to become an investor, and we all know how savvy GS is. Ahem. But it's not the technology that could be the problem here.

One question the company has to answer satisfactorily, in the eyes of its potential customers is, in my view, whether or not they are ready to park their users out in the cloud. Right now, as I understand it most enterprises are pretty wary about moving anything that's even slightly mission-critical: the industry is still very young, there are big questions marks over the value of SLAs and the trust you need to put in the provider, and whether or not the network can handle the load -- assuming of course that you have a backup for the Internet should Bad Stuff happen and you lose the link.

So I'd be interested to know: would you put your users in the cloud. Is the cloud ready, or would you anticipate a deluge of complaints around later afternoon when the schoolkids come online? And at 0900 when the bootstorm hits your outgoing link? And at lunchtime, ditto?

So, do I hear you singing: "Don't put your users in the cloud, Mrs Worthington"?