Desktop as a Service: The Big ‘So What?’

Financial: Migrating away from Windows XP in favor of Windows 7 and 8 often requires major upgrades in client hardware. Moving to DaaS can save potentially large capital expenditures. Removing or reducing a CapEx category such as PC hardware costs from the financial ledger and replacing it with operating expenses such as cloud-based subscription services is extremely attractive to business executives. Moreover, DaaS helps control operating costs by reducing the need for IT deployment resources and in-house technical support and offers predictable subscription costs for better corporate financial planning.

Consistency: The quest for organizational agility and flexibility is a key driver in such trends as hiring temporary workers or consultants for short-term opportunities, and DaaS gives organizations the ability to provide all necessary desktop rights and resources in a matter of hours. DaaS also helps circumvent the inevitable upheaval in managing disparate infrastructure resulting from mergers and acquisitions; DaaS deployment can eliminate a major headache for strapped IT organizations, which often struggle with integrating new employees into corporate systems extremely quickly without having to overhaul IT infrastructure. DaaS can also help software development teams set up temporary test beds for development and testing. But one of the most significant areas where DaaS can mitigate deployment challenges is business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR). I’ll discuss that in detail in a future post.

Standardization: DaaS helps ensure a consistent user experience, regardless of device format or brand, while standardizing deployment, security and support. In an era where telecommuting and remote-office computing are increasingly the norm, DaaS is an ideal solution for geographically dispersed workforces.

Security: With DaaS, data and applications reside in the cloud instead of on end-user devices that are ripe targets because of weaker security tools and more lax security practices of the end users themselves. Cloud-based DaaS also helps alleviate another challenge associated with BYOD by enabling a consistent set of security protocols across users’ own mobile devices, regardless of mobile operating system or hardware brand. Tactical security steps increasingly become the purview of cloud service providers rather than in-house IT, which is a huge advantage because of the service provider’s ability to dedicate more resources and utilize a greater body of experience on security matters than most in-house IT organizations can deliver.

Deployment: Smaller, less-specialized IT staffs put a premium on the IT department’s ability to onboard new users faster and more easily, as well as on making the move to virtual desktop deployment at less cost and with a smaller IT footprint. VDI was an important first step, but it does require some specialized expertise from IT organizations or via outside help. DaaS, by contrast, doesn’t require the same level of expertise and experience that VDI deployment requires, which cuts down on deployment and support requirements for in-house staff and obviates the need to spend money to hire external VDI specialists.