The Business Benefits of Desktop as a Service

When a company is considering desktop virtualization, there are a few different angles that need to be satisfied. The IT team has to be comfortable with the technology, its capabilities and its fit. But the business side of an organization needs to be just sold as well. Desktop virtualization can be a major shift for organizations (especially if they’re at the beginning of their digital transition) but is often worth it for the range of benefits it offers organizations.

Considering desktop as a service (DaaS) adds an additional element to the conversation as organizations are engaging with an outsourced service provider. This adds additional benefits as in-house teams no longer have to build, optimize and maintain virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Whether you’re an IT professional trying to convince the business side that desktop virtualization is worth pursuing or you’re a business leader researching a new solution, here are a few of the business-focused benefits of virtual desktops, specifically DaaS.

Business Insights

We’ll start with the show stopper: Virtual desktops give organizations the opportunity to access business intelligence and insights business leaders have only dreamed of.

Think about it, just about every employee does their work through a desktop. That’s a wealth of information flowing through an organization that’s currently untapped. With a DaaS service that offers an analytics portal, organizations have easy access to all that information.

Common trends for business leaders to analyze include:

• Whether desktops are properly sized (or if resources are going unused)
• If the company has over purchased software licenses
• Which applications are highly used (and which can be phased out)
• Seasonal and time-based usage spikes and trends
• What makes highly productive employees so productive
• Is your workforce largely active or sitting idle
• And more

Security

If you’re a business leader who isn’t concerned about and engaged with your organization’s cybersecurity, you have some catching up to do (here’s why you should care). The threat landscape is getting more intense and security breaches and attacks are making the news now (think Equifax and the WannaCry ransomware attack).

Virtual desktops make it easier to implement company-controlled security and controls. The controls in place on the virtual desktop remain in place regardless of the endpoint or location of the end user. For example, if you don’t want employees to have the ability to print or externally save company data, you can disable that feature – even if employees are remote and using their own personal devices.

Another major security risk is the sheer time it traditionally takes for IT to roll out patches and updates. Even if organizations are on top of updates, it takes time if they need to touch every endpoint or rely on employees to accept an update and restart their computers. (One of the reasons WannaCry was so pervasive is many people ignored a recommended update.) With virtual desktops, changes are made to the Golden Image (the “master copy” of the desktop) and is pushed to every desktop using that image the next time a user logs in.

DaaS can offer an additional security incentive over in-house VDI as some DaaS providers handle things like antimalware, antivirus and automated vulnerability patching for you.

Compliance

Compliance is another prong of security and is an important aspect for any organization. But for organizations in highly regulated industries, the compliance requirements increase noticeably.

Desktop virtualization itself won’t help an organization achieve ore maintain compliance, but choosing a DaaS vendor that offers a compliant solution can take a lot off a company’s plate and help compliance measures extend down through the endpoint (which is historically a compliance black hole).

Dizzion offers PCI DSS and HIPAA HITECH compliant virtual desktops >>

Scalability

Whether an organization experiences employee growth on a seasonal basis or has steady predicted growth over time, adjusting to changing needs can be difficult with traditional desktop provisioning.

In seasonal situations, you either have to supply seasonal workers with company endpoints that go largely un- or under-utilized for the rest of the year or rely on employee owned devices (which may present security and compatibility issues). Predicted growth is a little easier to manage, but organizations often still find themselves with unused endpoints or having to buy a device last minute to accommodate an unexpected hire. Scaling isn’t perfect, which makes planning for scaling difficult.

With virtual desktops, employees in either situation can use their own devices without security, compliance or compatibility concerns. Virtual desktops also breathe new life into all those old endpoints that are likely sitting in an IT supply closet. Those devices can often be turned into thin clients that can then be used with virtual desktops without any performance degradation.

With easy-to-deploy solutions like this, an organization can meet any scaling demands without worry.

Predictable Budgeting

There isn’t an executive in business today who isn’t looking for budget optimization opportunities. In addition to the optimization opportunities surfaced by business insight portals in DaaS solutions (licensing, application, workforce and resource right-sizing), desktop as a service is like any other SaaS solution in that it represents a largely predictable OPEX cost.

Rather than supporting (and routinely replacing) desktop infrastructure in-house, moving to a desktop as a service solution shifts that responsibility to the DaaS provider. Your vendor is the one updating and upgrading infrastructure – and that cost is split amongst all their clients instead of entirely on you. The cost of purchasing endpoints can also be reduced as virtual desktops allow organizations to employ more cost-effective thin clients or even move entirely to a bring your own device (BYOD) policy.

Between easier company growth and security, better business insights, and multiple optimization opportunities, desktop as a service is as much of a business solution as it is IT.