Part 2: The Benefits of Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)
Having software that works for you and helps your company run smoothly and efficiently while reducing costs and increasing the happiness of your employees is critical to ensuring the long term success of your business. In part two of our series, we will explore the benefits of Desktop-as-a-Service.
1. Mobile
With DaaS and hosted virtual desktops, your team members can access their workspace anywhere, anytime – which means at home, on a plane, in the car, and on any phone, tablet, PC, etc. This can massively increase productivity availability over time.
Say, for example, that you live in an area with severe weather conditions, or that an employee moves out of state or has to stay home to care for a sick family member. With traditional, office-bound technologies, you would lose that employee’s productivity or – in the case of a move – their skillset altogether. With DaaS, you don’t. This move to the virtual data center is especially important today, not just for your business but also to your employees: the pull of a remote environment is more enticing than ever, and having remote capabilities will make you a much more desirable employer now and in the future.
2. Scalable
In today’s ever-changing technological landscape, businesses have to consistently update and evolve – if they don’t, they’ll fall behind and get lost behind a competitor. While on-premise solutions (and even traditional virtual desktop management solutions) can be very rigid, technologically draining, and costly on this front, DaaS is not.
DaaS allows for flexible scaling both vertically and horizontally, which means that:
- You’ll never be limited to how many desktops can be running at once, so your employees will always be able to access their applications and documents
- You won’t have to spend a lot of money to scale
- You won’t have to rely on tech experts to scale
- You won’t need to be in-office to scale as necessary
- You can even scale down if your technological needs decrease and you want to streamline.
This gives your business and staff huge flexibility and power, which is incredibly important when it comes to this kind of technology.
3. Secure
Today, technological security should be one of your most pressing concerns – cyber threats are a real and prescient problem, and having a dedicated professional on your team addressing those threats can be difficult and costly.
With DaaS, that all changes. Why? While many people think that the cloud is actually less secure than an on-premise solution, and more vulnerable to hacks, vulnerabilities, and security threats, that’s just not the case with DaaS.
Desktop-as-a-Service is extremely secure because it includes multiple layers of security. This includes both physical (access control, large gates, cameras, etc.) and virtual security layers (Firewalls, VPN, IP Filtering.)
SEE ALSO: Webinar: Strengthening Security in the Cloud
Plus, many cloud providers procure and maintain dedicated cybersecurity professionals who are charged exclusively with keeping up on the latest cyber trends and how to secure a solution to keep malicious sources out. While this does not entirely release the user from the responsibility of securing their endpoints and data, it can significantly reduce the complexity.
Finally, there are significant improvements with DaaS when it comes to another “security” problem – and that’s the security of your data. With DaaS, there’s backup and storage of your data through a network of devices that you can tap into, significantly reducing your costs. Even better, the managed service provider becomes responsible for the maintenance and updates to these systems and all you have to do is send the data to be stored and automatically backed up. Security, checked.
4. User-friendly
As we mentioned – and as you probably know – undergoing this kind of digital change can be difficult. Onboarding your team can be a lengthy, complicated process, involving training, downloads, configurations, and more. This can be even worse if there is employee turnover or any issues with the migration – and that’s not even touching on the complexities that can arise post-migration. With Hosted Virtual Desktops, this and other processes can be streamlined and simplified.
Why? The complexity of providing the infrastructure, securing, provisioning all lies in the hands of the service provider. Additionally, many solutions include built-in platforms that enable you to:
- Create new, customizable servers or desktops
- Track order history and changes to the account
- Create admin users
- Remotely control your servers or desktops
- Add or remove hardware components such as memory, CPU and disks.
All of this can be managed through a secure web portal that gives you full transparency into your infrastructure, which can improve your IT efficiency and decrease complexity.That means more time, more money, and more people on your team with the skills to pitch in.
5. Enjoyable
If your employees struggle to work your technology on a day-to-day basis, this:
- Decreases productivity
- Increases errors
- Lowers job satisfaction
- Lowers productivity
- Increases employee turnover
Having an easy-to-use, understandable DaaS solution can prevent all of these issues and increase the productivity and job satisfaction of your entire team.
6. Cost-effective
The typical lifecycle of a desktop is approximately 3 years. Within that cycle, businesses spend countless hours on the physical maintenance of the device. From physical procurement of the device and software to maintenance and end-user costs, it can cost a business anywhere from $280 to $480 per desktop in a traditional desktop lifecycle. Hosted Virtual Desktops can provide the same features and functionality but at just 10-20% of the cost. How is this possible?
To start, by utilizing a hosted desktop solution, businesses remove the burden of securing the required infrastructure, physical space to house that infrastructure, and the utility fees to run that infrastructure. Not to mention the time and effort to manage the system that is required of an in-house IT staff. All of these fees and tasks are offloaded when you use a Hosted Virtual Desktop Solution and the provider of the service takes on the expense of the infrastructure and time of the maintenance, freeing your internal staff up to focus on other mission critical needs.
7. Increases productivity and collaboration:
Many businesses and decision-makers think that a remote team member is an unproductive team member – but that’s just not the case today. In fact, in-office distractions like water cooler gossip and interruptions from visitors can be much bigger issues to productivity – and these problems can go away altogether in a remote, self-controlled environment. In fact, 86% of individuals surveyed by SurePayroll, a web-based payroll service provider, stated they could achieve maximum productivity by working alone – and ⅔ of the managers surveyed say their employees who worked remotely increased their overall productivity.
Commit to the Future of Work Today
DaaS enables this kind of remote strategy, allowing your employees to access any and all of their data from any device – whether it is a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. This removes the operating systems barrier and, once again, opens the door to a more diverse and skilled team for your business.
