How Desktop as a Service is transforming the digital workspace

Companies of all sizes are turning to desktop as a service, DaaS, solutions to satisfy their digital workspace needs. Traditional desktops and laptops are costly and difficult to manage, and they pose significant security challenges. Virtual desktop infrastructure, VDI, replaces traditional systems with virtual ones powered from your datacenter. Many enterprises have successful VDI deployments, but are looking for options that extend their organisation into cloud and reduce management overhead. DaaS overcomes the challenges of traditional desktop and laptop systems and can serve as a platform to deliver VDI from clouds.

For companies undergoing digital transformation, DaaS is a great way to empower both your end users and your IT teams. End users benefit because they have greater flexibility to work from anywhere, on any device, and collaborate more easily with co-workers, partners, and suppliers. IT teams benefit because DaaS can simplify VDI integration and delivery while making it easy to add new services to an Enterprise’s digital workspace whenever and wherever you need them at the speed of the business.

Top 10 reasons to choose DaaS

Reason 1: Eliminate desktop and laptop challenges
Managing and supporting a large number of desktop and laptop workstations with locally installed software is a challenge for companies of all sizes. Employees come and go regularly, and appropriate devices have to be supplied and retrieved. Keeping close tabs on desktops and laptops, often across numerous physical locations, is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. An even bigger concern for most companies is security risks created by physical computing devices with data stored locally.
DaaS addresses these challenges by moving all the heavy lifting into an enterprise or cloud data centre:
User applications no longer need to be installed or run locally on each device. Company data remains in your datacenter or the cloud where it is more secure. If a physical device fails, the user can simply switch to a different device and pick up where they left off.

Reason 2: Remove the expertise barrier
For many companies, running VDI in-house is subject to operational, performance, and scaling constraints due to a lack of expertise and experience. Smart companies increasingly view DaaS as an elastic complement to existing VDI deployments or an opportunity for continued growth in VDI in hybrid cloud. DaaS reduces or eliminates VDI management challenges, enabling IT teams to focus on delivering services to businesses and end-users, and satisfying digital transformation goals.

Reason 3: Focus on strategy, not tactics
DaaS is an important part of your digital transformation strategy, significantly reducing the IT effort required to support end users and freeing your team to focus on business outcomes rather than IT outcomes. DaaS makes it possible to continuously integrate and continuously deliver emerging technologies. DaaS also allows you to quickly support projects that require a fast ramp up, without exposing your company’s network and intellectual property. In many industries, mergers and acquisitions are a fact of life. DaaS can help you accelerate onboarding of new employees during acquisitions and grant them immediate access to company applications, data, and services.

Reason 4: Overcome geographic limitations
DaaS offers a great solution to address digital workspace needs across disparate geographies. With the right DaaS solution, employees can work from almost anywhere that has an internet connection and receive good performance. If users in different locations need to collaborate electronically, DaaS solutions can facilitate collaboration.

Reason 5: Enable BYOD
Adopting a BYOD policy, as many companies are doing, makes device management even more intractable. With DaaS, your company’s important applications run in your provider’s infrastructure services, safely isolated from other activity on user devices. Users gain access to applications and data only after proper authentication. And because no data is stored locally on the device, there’s no risk of compromise if the device is lost.

Reason 6: Soar into the Cloud
DaaS provides an platform for Enterprises to understand and consume cloud services without having to learn new technology terminologies. DaaS also accelerates the cloud learning maturity in an organisation because they can focus on application service integration and delivery without worrying about tech debt and tech inertia.

Reason 7: Pay only what you use
The ability to pay as you go—and pay only for what you use—is a hallmark of IT success in the digital age. DaaS simplifies your operations, reduces your per user costs, and makes perfect sense for organisations in the midst of digital transformation. DaaS reinforces a subscription based consumption model that meters on actual usage.

Reason 8: Simplify scaling
The worst thing that can happen to new employees is to have them sit idle waiting for the computing resources they need to do their jobs. But planning for resource needs and scaling infrastructure—whether physical systems or VDI—to keep up with the needs of a dynamic enterprise is hard. DaaS provides immediate scalability to simplify the planning process and address unforeseen needs. You can provision new desktops as needed and release them just as quickly.

Reason 9: Maintain full control
A common concern that many enterprises have when it comes to DaaS is loss of control, but DaaS and BYOD don’t necessarily mean that you lose control over your environment. In fact, you may even increase control. DaaS gives you both greater visibility and increased cost control. Depending on your DaaS provider, you can quickly and easily grant (or remove) access to applications and data at a granular level. You can control access to data and prevent employees from making local data copies or writing data to insecure devices. Employees can also access specialised resources like GPUs on an as-needed basis.

Reason 10: Step up security
DaaS eliminates the risks that result from sensitive data stored on user devices. Data remains secure in a datacenter, subject to your full control and established governance. DaaS providers take security seriously and offer a variety of advanced authentication and other security capabilities.

By Paulo Pereira, Director, Systems Engineering, Emerging Markets and Eastern Europe at Nutanix.