An environment where desktops are hosted in the cloud provides the ability to outsource maintenance and management of these virtual resources to a service provider. This setting relies on the service provider's data center infrastructure, thus granting the ability to efficiently scale resources and offering potential cost savings due to the shared nature of the environment. This is unlike onsite hosted environments that necessitate the organization's upfront investment in infrastructure and ongoing maintenance, and unlike a private or public cloud which refers to the cloud model itself and does not specify it specializes in hosted desktop environments.