Tools to Assess DaaS & VDI Providers

As the year winds down IT teams are looking to spend any remaining budget and planning projects for next year. For an increasing number of organizations focused on digital transformation, this planning includes assessing desktop virtualization options. As the move to cloud solutions continues to gain momentum, hosted desktop as a service (DaaS) providers are gaining more favor over resource intensive in-house solutions. 

If finding and evaluating a DaaS or VDI solution is on your radar, take a multi-step approach to research, assessment and vendor selection that will help you streamline your search and find the right fit. Here are tools to help you with each phase of the evaluation and purchasing process. 

Phase 1 – Initial Questions

There are many VDI and DaaS providers to choose from. The only way to start narrowing down the field is by gathering key information and weeding out providers that don’t fit your needs. Start with an initial discovery call that covers the basics of their solutions and services. Here are some of the most common questions Dizzion’s Solutions Engineers hear. They may help guide your initial questioning.

12 Questions for Assessing Desktop Virtualization Service Providers >>

Phase 2 – Vendor Evaluation

After the first round of research, you should have a few providers identified to move onto the next phase of assessment. Now it’s time to dive deeper into how well their solution fits your needs. This step is an extension of the initial questioning where you identify more of your specific needs and evaluate at a high level if your identified vendors can meet those demands. You may do this through additional conversations or through online research.

To work through this phase, download the DaaS Provider Evaluation Checklist.

Phase 3 – Request a Demo

Once you know that a provider can most likely meet your needs (through your earlier evaluation research) request a demo of their services. This will let the provider learn more about your needs and give you a chance to hear how they’ve meet similar needs and uses cases for other clients. It also gives you a more direct way to ask additional questions and dive deeper into how a solution might fit into your organization.

One of the more enlightening elements of a solution demo is listening to the questions and scenarios presented by the provider. Did a use case you didn’t initial think about come up? Will an aspect of your business or tech stack affect the potential solution in an unanticipated way? Service providers are the experts in this field — they’ve seen more implementations and challenges than you likely imagined.

Request a Dizzion DaaS Demo >>

Phase 4 – Solution Evaluation

Now that you’ve identified your top potential vendors, it’s time to dive into the individual solutions for your needs. A good place to start is with a traditional request for proposal. This gives you a set of information to evaluate before you decide to spend more dedicated time with each potential vendor and may help you further narrow down your choices.

Create an RFP that’s customized to your needs, uses cases and existing environment to get the most accurate understanding of potential solutions.

This Desktop as a Service RFP Template is a good place to start when crafting you own requests for proposal.