Why Desktop as a Service (Not Just VDI)

Just about every organization today uses some form of cloud based solution or managed service. This approach lets organizations access vital capabilities without building programs (that aren’t the business’ focus) entirely in-house. This same philosophy can be applied to desktops.

While desktops may seem like a simple part of everyday business, they’re actually time consuming to maintain and can take focus away from main company objectives. (They also play a much bigger role in business than you’d think!) Between being necessary and time consuming, desktops are the perfect candidate for outsourcing to a managed services provider.

There are many uses cases for desktop virtualization, but the technology is only up to the task if designed, implemented and maintained correctly. If provisioning desktops isn’t the main business-driving role of in-house IT today, building and maintain in-house virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) certainly isn’t.

Here are a few reasons companies that want to virtualize desktops should strongly consider desktop as a service (DaaS) rather than trying to build VDI themselves.

Access to Purpose-Built Infrastructure

One of the major reasons early VDI was a major performance disappointment is because it wasn’t built on the right infrastructure. From It’s Time to Revisit VDI:

Early VDI struggled with managing large files and increased network traffic due to a wide variety of factors, including poor storage performance, human error, incorrect or mismatched QoS policies, hardware failure and lack of end-user monitoring.

Desktop workloads are much different than server workloads and many times desktops needed more and/or different infrastructure resources than high performance databases or applications. Storage performance or IOPS (input/outputs per second) was immediately exposed as a major performance bottleneck.

Today, there’s a better understanding of what infrastructure is needed to support high-performance virtual desktops. The tricky part is, it needs to be purpose built by an expert who understands the deep details. By opting for DaaS, companies get access to existing, purpose-built VDI that was designed and implemented by desktop virtualization experts. You don’t need datacenter space for new infrastructure. You don’t need to hire an in-house VDI expert. The heavy lifting is already taken care of – tuned, tested and ready to go.

Planning & Implementation Assistance

With DaaS “alternatives” like infrastructure or platform as a service, you’re left to implement and support the actual virtualization and desktop Golden Images. So, in essence, while the physical infrastructure is taken care of, in-house IT teams are still dealing with 100% of the desktop support … and now need to learn how to build, provision and support virtual desktops.

A fully managed DaaS service not only provides the infrastructure, but has virtualization experts on hand to help you define your use cases, design your Golden Images, explain what needs to happen in-house, test everything and troubleshoot if an unanticipated issue or need arises.

Maintenance is Included

Infrastructure isn’t a “set it and forget it” solution, it needs to be maintained and eventually replaced or upgraded as time goes on. With in-house VDI, this is your responsibility. But with DaaS, the solution provider maintains the infrastructure and has a business imperative to consistently update and upgrade the VDI to ensure the best performance and security for its clients.

With a fully managed DaaS solution, infrastructure maintenance isn’t the only perk; some vital maintenance to your virtual desktops themselves is also taken care of. For instance, Dizzion’s cloud desktops include antimalware, antivirus, automated vulnerability patching and other features that help maintain a high performance, secure environment with minimal effort on your part.

Additional Services

When you build VDI in-house, you get only what you build. Features like virtual application streaming (separate from full virtual desktops) and complaint environments require extra work and a much wider project scope. It’s easy to see how an in-house virtualization project can quickly expand to a much larger undertaken than initially anticipated. If you want to manage, monitor and gain insights from your virtual environment, you have to purchase and implement a series of third party tools.

By selecting a robust outsourcing solution (one that provides a suite of end user computing services rather than just virtual desktops) you can gain centralized access to additional virtual solutions and built-in environment insights. This not only elevates stress on in-house teams, but can also help shrink your vendor footprint. Having access to integrated solutions from a single provider can reduce in-house management time and provide a more comprehensive view into your overall environment.

Overall, while in-house VDI and managed desktop as a service may seem to present the same solution, DaaS is a step forward while VDI is only a step sideways.