Is the "Cloud" suitable for very demanding Applications to reduce costs?

We have an Windows application that is very demanding on the customers hardware. It can occasionally eat 1-2 gigs or more of RAM, tortures the CPU and has a high net开发者_运维知识库work usage.

So our clients need very sophisticated hardware which is expensive for them and makes us less competitive on the market.

Let's say we (my employer exactly) want to cut those costs by transferring our software to the cloud. The big problem here is, we are not allowed to tailor the application for the cloud. We only want to put every running instance of the application into some cloud-service, managed server whatever.

My concern is that I can't really estimate the costs involved in running such applications (with many users) in the cloud and all this will be only buzz. Can this be cost effective at all without overhauling the application a lot?

Any ideas or links on that matter are much appreciated.

This is difficult to answer without taking an exact look at the application. But you can try Remote Desktop Technologies like Citrix (http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/home.asp) to make a remote install on a server possible and reduce client costs.