Research giant Gartner has rightly declared Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions as the “defacto solution of choice” for business workspaces. DaaS technology is not new, just like the cloud revolution, but with the biggest operating system players like Microsoft getting on board and saying good-bye to the physical desktop as we know it, it seems Gartner’s assessment about DaaS is well founded.
HTF Market Intelligence released a report lately, declaring that the DaaS market is expected to attain a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 49%. This statistic greatly outruns the growth in spending on traditional, on-premise IT infrastructures.
This trend also seems to reconcile with Citrix’s assessment once it surveyed its top Citrix Service Providers. An overwhelming 70% of service providers were anticipating increased revenues from a growing DaaS market globally. Citrix also discovered that the average size of their provider’s seat count has grown, with over 16% of the market share attributable to organizations with 500 plus provisioned virtual desktops or seats.
Gartner’s survey on DaaS providers showed an even stronger growth, as 75% of the surveyed vendors indicated they had a customer with over 1,000 seats or deployed virtual desktops. All of this goes to show that businesses are recognizing the inherent value in Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). Enterprises are increasingly turning to the technology to meet their productivity needs and substitute traditional IT infrastructures with DaaS.
Why Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)?
Gartner defines Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) as “a service offering that deploys a virtualized desktop experience, delivered to a customer on demand from a remote location.”
By its very definition, DaaS is radically changing the nature of work today. DaaS gives businesses and employees alike the freedom to choose when, where and how they want to work. This freedom extends to the devices they use, regardless of the operating system (OS), its version or brand of the endpoint device.
As long as your employees are able to access the internet and have a web browser, the Cloud Hosted Virtual Desktop (dinHVD) is accessible. Sick days, in-accessibility due to out of office travel or delays due to commuting no longer have the power to impede an employee’s productivity and threaten the business bottom line.
Control – The DaaS solution by dinCloud allows you to provision, modify or de-provision virtual desktops on the fly thru dinManage, our proprietary cloud management portal. If an endpoint device is lost or stolen, just change the access credentials in minutes and avoid potential theft of data, a task that is impossible with a standard desktop implementations.
Attacked by a cybercriminal? No problem, as all your enterprise data is stored centrally with multiple layers of security to keep it safe. With DaaS, your business is in full, instant control of every virtual desktop user and every endpoint device that accesses your dedicated cloud network provisioned from dinCloud.
Agility – the current process for most network administrators is that when an update, security patch or new application is to be installed, IT needs to physically access every user’s device and manually trigger an install file.
This is a tedious process, which can become further complicated if your employees are physically dispersed. Further, during the whole process, your employee has to forego the device till the whole process is complete and this directly affects productivity.
With DaaS however, instead of coordinating schedules between IT and users, IT just needs to update the cloud and the updates funnel down to each user’s virtual desktop. The process of rolling back a software or unstable update is also just as simple.
DaaS providers like dinCloud provide the additional benefit of maintaining system restore points at every crucial stage of updating or patching. With the slightest signs of unstable behavior, virtual desktops can be instantly restored to the last known best configuration.
Productivity – productivity gains are two-fold. Not only does IT spend less time working on routine maintenance and installs over devices, but employees also spend less time without access to their workstations.
If an employee’s endpoint device fails in case of DaaS, all a user has to do is find another workstation and pick up right from where the work was left off. An impromptu meeting between departments? Instead of having to return for a user’s laptop that holds the data or work, the user just needs to log into their virtual desktop from whatever endpoint is accessible and proceed uninterrupted.
Critical tasks can still get done, even if workers find themselves unexpectedly out of the office. This may happen due to their own or a family member’s sickness, commuting issues, natural or other disasters. They can still access their virtual desktop and remain fully productive. The desktop and all of the accompanying data are stored in the cloud provider’s (CSP) data centers. So, all a user needs to do is find another web-enabled device and login.
Reduce CapEx – Although it may sound difficult at first glance, but it’s true. Virtual desktops and Desktop-as-a-Service enable businesses to significantly reduce capital expenses (CapEx) and even reduce operating expenses by as much as 50%.
How? By extending the serviceable life of existing workstations (desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices etc.). Since the majority of processing power is now on the cloud infrastructure, endpoint devices or workstations can continue to be viable well past their typical lifecycles. Because of this, businesses can postpone large capital expenditures required to upgrade employee devices.
The other area where enterprises can save CapEx with DaaS is that they no longer need to maintain expensive on-premise servers or data centers. In DaaS solutions, the underlying hardware resources such as Storage, CPU, RAM and GPU are provisioned from the infrastructure of your Cloud Service Provider (CSP).
Why dinCloud for Your DaaS Needs?
dinCloud offers digital transformation services to organizations across the world with its cloud platform. There is a dedicated hosted private cloud for each enterprise that further offers Hosted Workspaces and Cloud Infrastructure. All this remains under the full control of our customer. dinCloud’s cloud-based workspace offer includes:
- Hosted Virtual Servers to manage databases, print servers, and other applications
- Hosted Virtual Desktops that can publish just applications or entire desktops for 1:1 or 1:many users
- Cloud Hosted Virtual Databases that can efficiently serve as the back bone of your e-commerce store or any other online service
- Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) to provide resiliency, high performance, multi layer security and business continuity (BC)
- Robust Disaster Recovery (DR) mechanism by maintaining regular backups of your data at multiple data centers simultaneously
- Provisioning console to allow customers and their partners to self-service and allocate costs to the respective cost center
- Access to dinManage, which is dinCloud’s proprietary cloud management portal that enables you to view and manage your entire cloud service from a single interface
dinCloud was recently featured in the “Gartner Market Guide to Desktop-as-a-Service”, being listed among such powerhouses as Citrix and proving that dinCloud is a major player in the cloud virtual desktop arena. dinCloud works to offer a secure, efficient experience with transparent pricing to ensure that there are no surprises in your cloud bill.
DaaS is not just an overhyped and marketed technology. It has been declared by industry analyst firm, Gartner, as the ‘defacto workspace of choice’ and is a critical part of enabling businesses to transform digitally.
We invite you to learn more about why you should embark on a journey to Desktop-as-a-Service and that too, with dinCloud, in our whitepaper “Making a Case for DaaS”. You are also welcome to get in touch with one of our cloud specialists right away
