SMB managers often turn to Desktop-as-a-Service, or DaaS, platforms as a way to streamline budgeting, improve security and enable greater business scalability than they can achieve with on-premises desktops.
However, it’s not just management that benefits from DaaS. Employees of SMBs, too, gain a range of advantages when their employers provide them with DaaS solutions.
Employees may not be as interested in the business-oriented DaaS benefits like cost and security, but they do expect DaaS solutions to deliver value in a variety of other ways. Here’s a rundown of what employees look for in cloud desktops delivered through a DaaS architecture.
Easy accessibility
First and foremost, employees expect DaaS to be able to provide them with desktop environments that they can access from any time and anywhere. Universal accessibility is, after all, a core advantage of DaaS in general.
What’s more, a DaaS offering that delights employees should provide a straightforward, simple access process. Employees should not have to worry about installing special software or configuring their home routers in a certain way in order to get past corporate firewalls and reach their desktops. Instead, they want a solution like DesktopReady, which allows them to log in securely from any Web browser.
Integration with local devices
Another priority for employees at SMBs who use DaaS is the ability to connect painlessly to devices in their local environment, such as printers or local network file servers. They don’t want to have to set up special integrations for these devices, or use complex workarounds (like having to email themselves documents in order to print them from a separate device) in order to make use of on-premises IT resources.
DaaS offerings like DesktopReady provide this flexibility by easily integrating with on-premises devices, all while keeping the desktops themselves securely in the cloud.
Fast setup
Even though the typical SMB employee is not responsible for setting up his or her desktop environment (that task usually falls to the IT team), employees still want the process to be fast. They don’t want to wait weeks for a desktop to be provisioned and delivered to them.
This is another way in which solutions like DesktopReady meet employee expectations. By allowing IT teams to spin up a new, fully provisioned cloud desktop almost instantly, they give employees quick access to the environments they need to do their work.
Fast support
Likewise, when something goes wrong, employees want the problem fixed quickly. No matter how minor an issue may seem to the IT team, employees tend to view even simple problems as critical disruptions if they prevent them from doing their work.
What that means for DaaS is that employees expect an experience where problems that arise within their desktop infrastructure are minimal, and can be solved quickly when they appear. DesktopReady delivers this experience through proactive monitoring by the DesktopReady support team — which resolves many issues before they even impact end-users, and which boasts one of the lowest downtime rates in the industry.
Consistent experience
When SMB employees move from on-premises workstations to the cloud, they want to take their desktop experience with them. They don’t want to have to learn new applications or a new set of login tools.
Toward that end, SMBs can deliver maximum value to employees by choosing DaaS platforms that fully support the same Windows-based environments that they would run on-premises. This allows employees to keep the interfaces and applications they already know. From their perspective, little changes when their desktops move to the cloud.
Backups
When you tell your employees that you’re moving their desktops to the cloud, they expect the data and applications that are hosted on their desktops to be as reliable as any other cloud-based resource.
To achieve that goal, SMBs should choose a DaaS platform that, like DesktopReady, hosts its cloud desktops on an ultra-reliable public cloud. (In the case of DesktopReady, desktops are hosted on Azure.) DaaS platforms that rely on smaller, private clouds can’t guarantee as high a level of desktop availability and data protection.
Secure desktop sharing
Finally, in some cases, employees may wish to share their cloud desktops with other employees. Doing so can make it easier to collaborate; for example, a team working on a project could share a desktop to host that project, eliminating the need to share data or applications between multiple environments.
Of course, employees also expect security and privacy when they share cloud desktops. They want the ability to maintain separate accounts and private data storage, even on desktops that can also be accessed by other employees.
Using DaaS To Keep SMB Employees Happy
In order to deliver the ideal DaaS experience to your employees, it’s critical to choose a DaaS platform that is simple to access, provides a reliable and consistent user experience, integrates seamlessly with printers and other on-premises devices and offers a secure way to share desktops with others.
DesktopReady provides all of these features and more. Learn more about how DesktopReady can lower your SMB’s desktop costs, while also delighting your employees, by scheduling a demo.
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