What In-House IT Does When Outsourcing VDI

Let’s address an elephant in the room: A lot of IT teams are concerned that if they outsource a virtual desktop initiative they’ll be outsourcing their job. In reality, with a proper partnership, outsourcing desktops gives you more time to spend on your core business initiatives and less time wasted on a nominal task of building PCs, which no one likes to do!

IT teams should know that when you opt for a desktop as a service (DaaS) solution your job isn’t being outsourced, you are just getting rid of some of the nitty-gritty tasks like desktop provisioning, patching and AntiVirus. Your DaaS provider should act like a partner, fully integrated with your team to achieve your larger business goals and working in tandem to manage high performing, secure virtual desktop environments.

What the DaaS provider takes care of is mostly the infrastructure components; this includes the storage, networking, hypervisors and the virtual desktop software, just like your typical PaaS provider. The DaaS provider will build out your private cloud and work with your networking and Active Directory administrators to setup the integration. Once the networks are married, you will receive a hardened environment ready for you to install your third party applications into the golden image(s).

However, there are still some key aspects that in-house IT teams maintain responsibility for.

Group Policy Management

Many organizations already have Active Directory (AD) deployed and have specific user and computer Group Policies configured. With a DaaS provider, you will be able to integrate many of the policies you have across to the cloud. So if you have already customized your company’s screen saver, password, web browser favorites and settings, folder redirection and login script policies, you will be able to stay in full control of these settings. With the Active Directory forest trust in place, you will create AD Security Groups in your domain, which leaves you in full control over provisioning and de-provisioning your users’ access to a virtual desktop. With the networks connected together, from your firewalls, you will be able to granularly control what the virtual desktops have access to, back at your site or resources in the public cloud.

Updates & Patching

Depending on the DaaS provider, they may handle both the Anti-Virus/Malware signature updates and Microsoft patches in the entire environment. (If you want to shift those tasks off your plate, be sure to select a provider that offers these services.)

Many compliant customers have strict regulations on which third party application gets installed and the frequency of the patching of these applications. The customer remains in full control and management of both the installation and patching of any third party applications. You will be able to utilize virtualization technologies whereas you can install the application or patch one time in the golden image and the provider will push all of your changes across every desktop in the pool to ensure consistency.

What You Don’t Have to Worry About

When going with a DaaS provider, you no longer have to manage and maintain the platform, nor will you have to individually manage each desktop differently as with to traditional desktop deployments.

You can create specific pools that have the applications you need for each particular group of users. This will save you many hours of having to image and re-image machines and also gives you the ability to securely grant access to contractors that usually use devices not issued by your company.

The support portals offered by some DaaS providers help you support the virtual desktops and will help expedite user incidents faster than traditional PCs out in the field as you will be centralizing all of the users in the cloud.  For example, the Dizzion Control Center gives you dashboards of all of your desktops, including all RAM, CPU, Disk latency and many more deep analytics as well as past and real time utilization metrics. With these deep analytics, you are able to be more proactive with end user health than ever before.

With Dizzion’s proprietary Control Center, you also have access to 12 months of monitoring data to help with trend analysis and help debug your applications.

You may also like:

• What Exactly Does a VDI Expert Do?
• 4 Things Fully Managed DaaS Makes Easier for IT
• The Desktop as a Service Provider You Need to Know About