DaaS offers your organization a subscription-based, on-demand, virtualized desktop with your chosen operating system and applications. The idea is to take the burden away from your IT department, support staff, and data center resources by outsourcing your core desktop infrastructure to a provider. Your IT department still configures and controls your desktop but is spared from most of the regular management chores so that they can focus on other tasks.
Your employees can access this virtual desktop from your offices, from their homes, and from other remote locations. This is especially critical now as so many people have been forced to work remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown. Further, DaaS is a flexible approach as users can access your virtualized desktop from a PC, a mobile phone or tablet, or a supported smart device.
For hosting your virtual environment, you can choose a private, public, or hybrid approach. With a private approach, the virtual desktops are hosted in your own data center but are remotely managed by your provider. In a public scenario, your virtual environment is hosted and managed by the provider. A hybrid approach allows you to choose and customize some mixture of private and public.
What is a DaaS provider?
A DaaS provider hosts your cloud-based, virtualized desktop environment. Such a provider takes on the management of your desktop environment, offers you the necessary data center resources, and maintains the desktop virtualization infrastructure.
DaaS is often compared with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) since your desktop and applications run in a virtualized environment rather than directly on your PCs. But with VDI, you host and support your own physical and virtual machines. A DaaS provider, in contrast, handles these traditional VDI components, leaving you to focus more on controlling your virtual desktops and apps.
Ideally, a DaaS Providers can offer a better security posture, threat protection, DDoS prevention capabilities, and compliance certifications than you may be able to achieve through an on-premises implementation, according to Kam VedBrat, Microsoft’s partner group program manager for Windows AI and graphics platforms.
How to pick the right vendor
Once you’ve decided that DaaS is the right solution, selecting the right vendor depends on your needs as providers offer a variety of features from commodity DaaS services to full managed DaaS services, according to Downes. You’ll want to assess the costs, features, and services to match your company’s business case. You also must factor in the full costs associated with a DaaS solution, including charges not included in the provider’s pricing, such as network charges and additional charges for high-performance storage.
“Define your existing desktop computing costs so that a valid comparison to DaaS pricing can be made.” Downes says. “Cost is still an inhibitor to DaaS adoption, and the nature of discounts provided by DaaS vendors adds complexity to long-term cost forecasting.”
