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Digital Workplace trends have put IT and HR leaders under pressure to introduce greater End User Computing (EUC) choice including Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to attract and retain the brightest and best talent into their organizations. Employees increasingly prefer to use their own devices at work and as a result managing devices and ensuring secure application availability has become complicated and challenging for IT managers. This is making the traditional office infrastructure unsuitable to match expectations of both businesses and end-users and demands a move to a digital workplace that is flexible to address worker and business demands.
A Cloud-hosted desktop delivered “As a Service,” or DaaS (Desktop as a Service) has emerged as a viable and comprehensive solution for enterprises. While DaaS offers hardware and software components for managing devices, it leaves IT teams to struggle with a day to day operational management. However, Managed DaaS enables enterprises to unburden internal operations management of IT infrastructure, thereby enabling IT managers to focus on strategic issues related to business’ growth and profitability. Managed DaaS provides enterprises with an end to end implementation and management of digital workplace while ensuring secure and high application availability and superior end-user experiences.
Managed DaaS, the Digital Workplace Enabler
DaaS deployment and management, typically, is a specialized task requiring complex set of skills and resources. It comes with its own set of complexities in implementation and management such as,
- Provisioning of underlying network architecture & existing resources
- Workload configuration, applications & Peripheral integration
- OS migration & UAT testing
- Adapting group-based policies, governance, compliance & licensing
- Managing TCO and Stringent SLAs
- Virtualized environment monitoring & Round-the-clock support
To address the complexities, it is important for enterprises to Choose a Managed DaaS Provider (MDP). An effective Managed DaaS Provider can address the struggles in achieving quick scalability, managing application compatibility, simplifying varied use cases, improving the application performance, and striking the right balance between flexibility vs. stability.
Choosing the Managed DaaS Provider
It is important to choose a right implementation and management partner in order to avoid frequent business disruptions, increase in talent attrition, decrease in user productivity leading to poor business outcomes. Choosing the right MDP can provide a seamless workload transition and enhance end-user experiences multifold. The following section outlines key factors necessary to evaluate the right MDP:
- Technical Competency
- Focus on Compliance & Security
- Keeping you in business – Backup & Disaster recovery
- End-to-End support
- Price versus Absolute Value
Technical Competency
The right MDP should demonstrate competence in rightsizing and resource allocation as per the business needs of an enterprise. The ability to establish a well-structured workload migration process and cloud adoption roadmap are essential factors for evaluation.
The provider should address typical technical issues like Bandwidth, network connection speed, failover facility, latency-related concerns, remote access for far-off areas, and BYOD-compliance.
A provider with strong cross-domain expertise and experience across leading virtualization technology platforms, network technologies, Cloud platforms, Active Directory, and Server Management capabilities can enable faster rollouts of applications. This can maximize application availability and ensure minimal business disruption.
Post-implementation 24x7x365 monitoring and management are equally critical for the success of any DaaS implementation. Resolving critical end-user issues on priority in conjunction with the enterprise IT will ensure a satisfying end-user experience. The MDP that provides an outcome-oriented SLA will be accountable to address user issues promptly.
