Modern information and communication technologies have made the world shrink to a global village. This in turn has enabled organizations to expand their operations to geographically dispersed locations which was not possible before.
As organizations expand either within their own geographical area or beyond, their computing and productivity needs rapidly change. To support a large, diverse workforce across various locations, you need a versatile technology platform.
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To top that all off, the trend of remote workforce is increasing with every passing day. Most IT experts believe this trend to gain even more momentum in the months and years to come. Now, an internal network at the organizational level is no more adequate.
Modern Workforce Needs
The needs of the modern workforce, whether in the field of IT or otherwise, are quite versatile. They demand an environment whereby they can remain productive from virtually any location, whether it’s the office, home or anywhere else.
Now, while this scenario sounds great in the specific context of productivity, it gives rise to a number of technological and data security challenges.
In this post, we will highlight how Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) are the answer.
Key Stats about VDI and DaaS
While both these technologies are well afar from attaining their truly deserved potential, the stats around their growth are still quite encouraging.
To further supplement the above figure, the size of VDI and DaaS software market stood at $5 BN for the same year. Spending on VDI and DaaS technologies is growing at an annual rate of 11%, which outpaces overall IT spending by a large margin.
What these above stats around VDI and DaaS technologies suggest is that organizations are rapidly realizing the inherent benefits of both these Virtual Desktop (VD) deployment technologies. Both VDI and DaaS still hold immense growth potential, here’s why
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Catalyst behind Growth of Cloud
If we narrow down a few factors that acted as a catalyst for the cloud’s rapid growth, they would be ease of access, instant scalability and cost cutting. Among these few factors, the foremost aspect that instantly catches the eye of management is reduction in costs. Let’s briefly touch these benefits: –
Both VDI and DaaS greatly simplify the deployment as well as management of Virtual Desktops (VD). All VDs are provisioned from a centralized data center that is located on premise in case of VDI and your Cloud Service Provider in case of DaaS.
That’s not all, the deployment and management of productivity applications is also very simplified and streamlined. You don’t need to install, configure, patch and update every physical machine as is required in a conventional IT infrastructure.
Any changes that you need to make either in the VDs or virtualized apps are executed centrally and the change is implemented across the whole infrastructure. This also enhances your organizational agility in incorporating changes or rolling them back.
Improved Data Security
Both VDI and DaaS models of Virtual Desktop deployment are based on centralization of your organizational data. From an administrative as well as cyber security standpoint, a central repository of data can be secured much more effectively.
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These infrastructures also reduce the risks associated with loss or theft of a physical machine of any one of your employees. Even if such an event happens, your data is fully secure as no organizational data resides on your end point / login devices.
Super Versatile
In VDI and DaaS, your end users are not restricted to the use of a single device. With the right login credentials, employees can login to their Virtual Desktop environments from a multitude of low end devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktops.
This also eliminates the need for you to procure hundreds or maybe thousands of laptops for your organization’s employees. They can get fully up and running using their own, personal devices which don’t need to be high spec as their resources are not being used.
Flexible
In VDI and DaaS environments, you don’t need to arrange, install, configure and update each individual physical device for every new employee. All you need to do for a new employee is allocate one of the Virtual Machines (VM) from your vast pool.
Same goes for when one of your employees is leaving the company. You don’t need to worry about any business critical data slipping into the wrong hands or falling prey to a rogue ousted employee. Just decommission the VM under use and that’s all.
Superior User Experience
At the end of day, the productivity of employees relies on a robust, reliable infrastructure that is always up and running so that your workforce can utilize these resources whenever they feel most productive.
A centralized architecture ensures that every employee is using the same version of a productivity application, thus eliminating any integration related bottlenecks. A positive user experience in turn pays dividends in the form of higher employee productivity.
Conclusion
Perhaps the biggest injustice with VDI and DaaS technologies has been restricting their benefits to just saving costs. We have not even highlighted this aspect as an advantage of either VDI or DaaS, as this is just an accompanying consequence of adopting them.
The actual benefits far outweigh the only notion of saving costs. Lastly, by going for DaaS, you enjoy one major advantage, which is that you neither have to procure nor maintain the IT hardware supporting your VD infrastructure as this is done by your service provider.
