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We are thrilled to announce that Anunta has been named in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service (DaaS). We are deeply honored by this recognition since we believe this is a testament to our exceptional team’s unrelenting dedication, ceaseless efforts, and invaluable trust and support from our esteemed partners like you.

Vendors were recognized after a rigorous evaluation based on the Completeness of Vision and the Ability to Execute apart from their innovative DaaS products and services. The inclusion criteria covered Market Participation, Customer Interest Index, Regions, Technical Capabilities relevant to Gartner clients and so on.

A Glimpse at Anunta’s Offerings

Anunta’s Digital Workplace solutions underscore our commitment to business continuity, security, and compliance, assuring clients and partners of a robust and ultra-secure environment. Moreover, it affirms our dedication to fostering digital innovation, enabling organizations to thrive in today’s dynamic business landscape.

Our Digital Workplace Solutions power our customers’ success stories, enhancing employee experiences and competitiveness.

  • Through our VDI/DaaS offerings, we’ve improved productivity, scalability, and IT resource optimization.
  • Our Modern Desktop Management (MDM) solutions streamline device operations, reduce risks, and empower mobile productivity.
  • Anunta’s SASE solutions ensure top-notch security and simplify network management, reducing costs and enhancing user experiences.
  • Our expertise in Cloud solutions enables businesses to accelerate digital transformation and remain competitive.

At Anunta, innovation is in our DNA, and we take great pride in our three patented AI-driven platforms that are solving multiple use cases for our clients.

  • DesktopReady ensures a smooth transition to virtual desktops for SMBs while providing the reliability and support that your business demands.
  • EuVantage leverages advanced AI algorithms to proactively identify and resolve issues, ensuring uninterrupted productivity for your workforce.
  • CloudOptimal, with real-time insights and intelligent recommendations, helps organizations optimize their cloud spending while ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently.

What the Gartner Recognition Means to Us

We believe that our latest Gartner recognition was only possible with your steadfast partnership, invaluable feedback, and seamless collaboration. We take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support and trust in Anunta.

As a trusted advisor for your business, we will continuously strive to offer flexibility and customization while delivering an unmatched end-user experience to maximize the value.

We look forward to the exciting opportunities that lie ahead.

Read the press release here.

Disclaimer

Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service, Stuart Downes et al., 5 September 2023
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner’s research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Managing employee experience and workstation security was simple when physical workstations were located at central offices. With the disruption of digital workplace technology, employees can work from anywhere, on any device and at any time. While this is great for end users, IT admins will find it a bit tedious to manage data security without compromising on employee experience.

Modern day organizations are continuing to stay up to date to enhance employee experience, streamline their IT operations, and fortify their security measures to increase productivity. With so many endpoints used to access work through multiple networks, sensitive corporate data is dangerously at the risk of breach. At the same time, IT admins have a plethora of endpoints floating around to manage and update. And to this mix, we must add employee experience and satisfaction as well, ensuring that end users have seamless access to all relevant applications and data without any bottlenecks.

This might sound like an absolute nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be. This is where Modern Desktop Management saves the day.

What is Modern Desktop Management?

Desktop management used to involve manually configuring individual machines and deploying software updates through physical media. IT administrators had to wade through multiple challenges like high maintenance costs, security vulnerabilities, and diversity of devices. Advancements in technologies like cloud computing and infrastructure virtualization have contributed to a novel and modern way of anywhere work and this has made traditional desktop management approaches obsolete.

Modern Desktop Management (MDM) is an approach to managing and securing desktops and laptops within an organization using cloud-based platforms and centralized administration. It involves the use of MDM solutions that enable IT administrators to remotely deploy software, enforce policies, monitor device health, and apply updates and patches.

MDM solutions streamline device management processes, thus enhancing end user productivity and data security, and providing a unified experience across devices.

Why Modern Desktop Management?

User endpoints form a critical vulnerability risk because they are the primary access points for threat actors. According to a Cyber Risk Alliance Business Intelligence Survey conducted in September 2022, 60% of the participants said that the expanding attack surface (including mobile and IoT) is one of their major cybersecurity concerns.

If corporate devices are not managed well, one attack can take down the brand reputation and customer trust in a matter of minutes. This makes it crucial to have complete visibility and control of corporate endpoints.

This is where MDM offers the perfect solution by providing comprehensive visibility into all endpoints and the ability to fix any critical issue anytime and anywhere within minutes. MDM has the capacity to safeguard the organization’s IT assets in a way traditional desktop management doesn’t.

Let me share a few compelling reasons to adopt Modern Desktop Management.

Enhanced Security

MDM solutions have robust security features such as advanced endpoint protection, encryption, centralized security policy management, and vulnerability assessments. They protect the organization’s sensitive data and systems, provide defense against cyberattacks, and ensure compliance with industry regulations.

With MDM solutions, IT admins can centrally manage and control desktop configurations, policies, and security settings uniformly on all desktops. They can also enforce strong password policies, restrict specific software installations, and control access to sensitive data and resources.

Simplified Device Management

Traditional desktop management involves manually configuring individual desktops, which is a time-consuming process and requires physical accessibility to these devices. MDM solutions enable IT administrators to efficiently deploy software applications, manage user settings, and enforce security policies across a large number of devices, thus streamlining the deployment process, reducing errors, and improving overall productivity.

By automating time-consuming processes, MDM solutions also ensure that all systems are up-to-date, secure, and less susceptible to vulnerabilities.

Enhanced User Experience

Modern Desktop Management effectively supplements anywhere work by enabling employees to securely access their desktop environments, improving their productivity, collaboration, and work-life balance. It also enables quick and streamlined provisioning of new desktops, minimizing downtime, and allowing users to get their desktop environments running quickly.

MDM solutions often provide self-service portals and automated workflows, empowering end users to perform certain tasks themselves. By reducing dependency on IT staff, users experience faster response times, greater flexibility, and better satisfaction.

In today’s digitally driven workplaces, technologies like Modern Desktop Management are fast becoming a necessity. By providing a proactive approach to desktop management, MDM solutions enable IT departments to focus on strategic initiatives, rather than investing in routine maintenance tasks. They provide enhanced security, employee experience, and cost efficiency in one go, thus addressing almost all the most pressing challenges of a modern workplace in one shot.

Interested in adopting Modern Desktop Management in your organization? Reach out to Alicia from our team (alicia.lobo@anuntatech.com) and we would be happy to help.

Organizations across the globe are fast adapting to a pressing reality. Their stakeholders – investors, employees, and customers – are expressing growing interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets and compliance.

And in the world of business, numbers don’t lie.

A Gartner article says, “ESG is diligently monitored by 91% of banks, 71% of fixed income investors, over 90% of insurers, and 24 global credit rating agencies.” Whereas a PwC article says, “83% of consumers think businesses should actively shape ESG best practices.”

These numbers reveal a trend that cannot be ignored. As an organization, if you want to be ahead of the pack, you need your stakeholders on your side. And the best way to do this is by learning how to balance your profitability and money-making innovations against your ESG commitments.

This is where your cloud strategy can help define your future.

Cloud technology has the potential to be your trump card in meeting your ESG priorities by promoting energy efficiency, resource optimization, virtual collaboration, and transparent sustainability tracking.

The Role of Cloud Transformation in Addressing ESG Priorities

According to the market research firm, IDC (as reported by World Economic Forum), “the transition to cloud computing between 2021 and 2024 will prevent at least 629 million metric tons of carbon dioxide”. That’s an impressive number, if ever there was one!

In the race towards net zero emissions and fulfilling your social commitments, cloud technology has emerged as a game-changer in ESG priorities, enabling you to drive positive change. As more businesses move to the cloud to advance their ESG goals, the collective impact will undoubtedly pave the way to building a green and sustainable world.

Here is how your cloud technology helps you play the balancing game of furthering your business goals and fulfilling your ESG commitments:

Energy Efficiency

Significantly reduce your carbon footprint and moderate your environmental impact.
Cloud technology is inherently energy efficient. It substantially reduces energy consumption compared to traditional on-premises data centers as cloud providers optimize power usage, cooling systems, and server utilization in their data centers.

Resource Optimization

Avoid over-provisioning and wasteful utilization of resources, which ultimately leads to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
It offers a more sustainable approach to IT operations by enabling dynamic resource allocation, which means you can scale your computing resources up or down based on your evolving business requirements.

Sustainable Data Centers

Align your cloud operations with your broader goal of reducing carbon emissions.
Major cloud service providers strategically position their data centers in locations with abundant renewable energy supplies. For example, Google’s data centers are famous for sustaining themselves on wind and solar power.

Virtual collaboration

Contribute to lower carbon emissions from daily commuting, ultimately benefiting the environment.
Cloud-based collaboration tools are pivotal in the business world’s transition to remote work. Virtual meetings, online document sharing, and real-time communication reduce the need for employees to travel to work.

ESG Reporting and Transparency

Build trust and credibility with your stakeholders through transparent reporting.
Cloud technology comes with enhanced reporting capabilities. This streamlined cloud-based data management, and reporting helps you transparently communicate your sustainability efforts to your stakeholders.

Social Inclusion and Accessibility

Promote social inclusion at your workplace by ensuring that your cloud-based applications are accessible to the PwD community.
Technology has long been hailed as a democratic equalizing force, and cloud technology is no different. It offers everyone equal access to resources and tools, fostering a more diverse and inclusive workforce in your organization.

Have we convinced you to consider cloud technology to build your organization’s sustainable, responsible future? Contact Alicia from our team (alicia.lobo@anuntatech.com), and we will help you chart a roadmap aligned with your business needs.

Organizational priorities across the globe have massively shifted in the last couple of years and businesses today have a renewed need for enhancing agility and flexibility, improving operational efficiency, and ensuring disaster readiness.

Organizations planning to accelerate their digital workplace transformation are exploring avenues that complement these priorities. And one of these avenues is blended infrastructure in the form of hybrid cloud.

According to Statista research, in 2023, 72% of CIOs and CTOs are going to follow a hybrid cloud strategy to modernize their IT infrastructure. And that might just be the right way to go to make your organization future-ready.

Hybrid Cloud: Combining the Best of Both Worlds

For organizations seeking to optimize their digital workplace, a more open and flexible cloud strategy will be a gamechanger. Which is precisely what hybrid cloud provides. By combining the best of both worlds – public and private cloud – this strategy enables organizations to have the kind of flexible infrastructure that meets their unique needs.

Flexible and Scalable Approach
One of the primary reasons to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy is the flexibility and scalability it offers. With a hybrid cloud approach, you can leverage the scalability of the public cloud to handle peak workloads and constantly changing demands, while maintaining critical data and applications in your private cloud for enhanced security and control.

This flexibility that a hybrid cloud strategy offers helps you adapt to the ever-changing market conditions, scale your infrastructure up or down as you need, and deliver superior performance to your end users.

Greater Data Security
As cyberthreats continue to exist and evolve in a highly digitized world, data security is a key priority for organizations irrespective of size or industry. A hybrid cloud strategy allows you to strike a balance between security and accessibility. Sensitive and mission critical data and applications that need limited access can continue to remain on prem or in a safe private cloud with trusted vendor while other data can be moved into public cloud to make it accessible for everyone within and outside the organization with a secured access.

This approach ensures that you can maintain compliance, protect highly sensitive information, and safeguard your digital workplace from potential security breaches.

Better Cost Optimization
Business strategy is incomplete without considering cost efficiency. Adapting hybrid cloud strategy helps you optimize your costs as it allows you to scale your infrastructure up or down based on your requirements, eliminating the need for upfront investments in hardware or software. The option to distribute your workload between the two clouds reduces overall infrastructure costs.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
With ever evolving cyber threats and unforeseen global disasters, the business world is expected to have a contingency plan for uninterrupted business operations. Hybrid cloud offers this contingency for businesses by providing robust disaster recovery capabilities through replication of data and applications between public and private clouds. This helps to quickly restore critical services and data in the event of unforeseen system failure or disaster.

Choosing the Right Technology Partner for Your Cloud Journey

To maximize your ROI on cloud solutions, you need a reliable technology partner who brings extensive experience and deep understanding of hybrid cloud architectures, deployment models, and best practices. Your technology partner should provide you with insights and guidance to help you navigate through complexities of hybrid cloud adoption and make informed decisions that align with your business goals.

At Anunta, we provide you with insights and guidance to help you navigate the complexities of hybrid cloud adoption and make informed decisions that align with your business goals. Check out our cloud offerings designed to help you chart your successful cloud adoption journey. If you prefer a one-on-one conversation, please reach out to Alicia from our team (alicia.lobo@anuntatech.com) and we would be happy to help you.

Delivering great client experiences requires industry expertise and focused strategies. But when the industries you serve span across healthcare, finance, edtech, banking, and a lot more, ensuring great experiences for your clients is no longer straightforward.

One of our oldest customers, a global business process management service provider, is one such organization that excels at simplifying complex business processes of clients across industry.

Committed to elevating their clients’ experiences at every interaction, the BPO partnered with Anunta in 2011, a journey that continues to this day.

Building a Flexible Workplace with Desktop Virtualization

One of the very first customers of Anunta, when they entered the BPO industry, they wanted to reduce the dependency on their local IT team and create a highly flexible workplace for their workforce. We helped them adopt desktop and server virtualization, starting with a pilot of 500 users being migrated to a centralized virtual infrastructure. This successful desktop virtualization adoption enabled their workforce to work from any branch on any device to provide uninterrupted support to their clients.

With a distributed IT infrastructure and multiple in-house teams, vendors, and geographically distributed employees, the BPO giant wanted a cost-effective means of remotely managing their IT landscape, the rising cost of which was becoming a global concern. Partnering with Anunta, they were able to reduce this cost by an incredible 40%. Added to this, they were able to enhance user productivity and user experience with the increase in uptime that was a result of our proactive monitoring tool, EuVantage.

Adopting New Technologies to Ensure Superior Client Experience

With evolving client requirements and expectations, the business process management service provider had to adapt seamlessly to the new technologies and leverage them efficiently to ensure superior client experiences. IT outage was not a luxury they could afford in their commitment to provide only the best to their clients.

One of the major projects we partnered with them in 2017 was migrating their telephony platform across two sites from one vendor to another. Anunta’s pivotal role in identifying the right vendor and providing the best support during implementation played a significant role in helping the BPO leader deliver and follow through with their client commitments.

By the end of 2017, Anunta was managing close to 15,000 end points for our customer.

Consolidating Core Data Centers and Enabling Technology Integration

The growth of our customer was exponential since inception. Their strategic organizational goals involved multiple acquisitions, which led to complex IT management. In a bid to simplify their IT management, once again, Anunta was their trusted partner.

In 2018, we helped them consolidate their different data centers to enable centralized management of their disparate IT. Consolidating multiple data centers into one streamlined the customer’s IT administration and reduced infrastructure costs.

A few of the acquired companies had proprietary business applications and legacy IT infrastructure. Anunta undertook an end-to-end technology migration project, ensuring a reliable, modern IT infrastructure to better serve the needs of the end users and clients.

By the time we closed 2018, Anunta was handling more than 22,000 end points for our customer.

Setting Up New Centers and Expanding Their Cloud Presence

In their era of business expansion, our customer had to set up new centers to accommodate additional headcount. Once again, they teamed up with Anunta in their expansion activities, with our team of experts providing design and capacity management to ensure that they achieve TCO benefits with the new centers.

With the growing business, the maintenance and management of their on-prem infrastructure was tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Accessing heavy business applications over the existing network clogged bandwidth, which meant that business continuity activities would take a hit. So, when the customer wanted to move their workload from on-prem to cloud to modernize their legacy servers and refresh their technology, Anunta once again rose to the challenge to transform employee experience across locations.

Anunta architected a secure end-to-end managed solution and migrated virtual machines for more than 1000 users and 200 servers.

When 2022 ended, Anunta was managing more than 35,000 end points for the customer.

The Business Outcomes from the Engagement Though Numbers

With 99.95% availability of business-critical applications, the customer was able to achieve a 90% customer satisfaction score.

The customer also experienced an 18% improvement in infrastructure and services which increased agent productivity. Added to this, they recorded 35% reduction in infra and telecom management cost and 30% reduction in capex.

If you’re interested in learning more about our partnership with one of the leading business process management service providers and how we played a part in their growth story, check out the customer success stories below.

Creating a Next-gen Digital Workplace for a Healthcare Business Process Management Services Provider
Facilitating large scale Cloud Migration for a leading Business Process Management Provider
Transforming End User Experience for a Global BPM Provider
Simplifying Business Continuity & Resiliency for a Global BPM Provider
Leveraging Azure Cloud for a Leading Business Process Solutions Provider to Boost User Experience and Business Agility

When we resorted to remote working in 2020, we believed it to be a short-time fad brought on by sheer necessity. Now, from the poorly planned work-from-home strategies of two years ago to the thriving hybrid work model that has recently emerged, the way we work has gone through a swift evolution.

The first couple of years post-pandemic focused on workplace digitization to ensure a secure and collaborative means of working. From 2020 to the end of 2022, the will-we-won’t-we tug-of-war between remote/hybrid working and return to office kept the business world focused primarily on employee productivity.

But it’s 2023 now, and this focus too, seems to have shifted. For the first time since the five-day working week was implemented due to the growing unrest among the labor force almost a century before, employee requirements have become the driving force behind deciding the future of work.

What’s New in Today’s Digital Workplace?

Enhancing employee experience through a human-centric digital workplace is the talk of the town since the beginning of the new year. In fact, The Future of Work 2023 Report by Infosys says that from 2022 to 2024, businesses have been focusing on automation, and adoption of digital tools to create a digital workplace in an effort to foster a human-centric culture.

The report says that an overwhelming 73% of senior executives and managers surveyed said that flexible and remote workplaces will grow in the future and 41% of the companies said they are planning to increase remote working hires in the next 2 years.

In the last 2 years, we saw that remote working improves talent onboarding since the blurring of geographical boundaries brings more employee flexibility. And the hybrid model does wonders with employee retention. This is one of the main reasons why Forrester Predictions 2023 warns leaders that forcing employees back to the office will meet with “disastrous results”. It says that undoing hybrid and remote working will result in a loss of productivity.

Set against this context, organizations are faced with the most obvious choice – adopt digital workplace technologies with the goal to improve employee experience.

Digital Workplace Technologies that Improve Employee Experience

The Gartner 2023-2024 Tech Adoption Roadmap for Infrastructure & Operations says that there will be a 14% increase in the adoption of digital workplace technologies from the period 2021-2023 to 2022-2024. This increase will be driven primarily by the need to ensure a great digital employee experience.

The Gartner report validates this rise in percentage with some employee experience statistics. Employees expressing satisfaction are 60% more likely to stay with the organization and are 69% more likely to be high performers.

This data becomes even more crucial in the face of one of today’s biggest business challenges – scarcity in talent, an aspect we discussed in detailed in one of our recent whitepapers.

Among the digital workplace technologies already deployed by organizations, Gartner says, 60% improves speed and agility, and 40% enhances employee experience.

It also says, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is already a favorite among CIOs and IT decision-makers as it is a high value, low risk technology.

How DaaS Enhances Digital Employee Experience

With employee experience being a critical factor for business success, it is a priority for organizations to invest in digital workplace technologies like DaaS, which invariably provides a high return on investments.

DaaS addresses employee experience challenges in many ways, from providing remote access to business applications to ensuring minimum downtime. With DaaS, employees get the support to remain productive without loss in effort or time, without the risk of data breach or loss.

A few ways that DaaS empowers employees:

  • Onsite and offsite employees are constantly connected to the virtual infrastructure because DaaS enables working from anywhere.
  • By providing a virtual workplace on even their personal devices, DaaS ensures that any personal applications installed on the device are well and truly separated from critical business applications.
  • The IT team can monitor all virtual machines from anywhere and perform software updates and maintenance remotely, which means that employees don’t lose time waiting for IT support.
  • If any device the employee is working on malfunctions or become inaccessible, all they have to do is switch to another device. Their data and applications are device agnostic, and thus, accessible from anywhere.
  • Employees do not have to worry about corporate data theft or loss even if their device gets stolen. DaaS comes with concrete security, and nothing is saved locally.

(Learn more from our COO, Maneesh Raina, as he explores in detail how DaaS ensures great end user experience.)

The future of work is employee centric. As we make the shift to a human-centric digital workplace that is driven largely by employee expectations, organizations must realign their IT strategies with a fresh perspective. The workplace of the future is not about numbers but more about experiences. And with digital workplace technologies like DaaS, which provides the ideal infrastructure for seamless operations, organizations can ensure that these experiences are both meaningful and repeatable.

IT leaders have to navigate a sea of challenges in today’s cloudy business environment.

Inflationary pressures make it difficult for businesses to acquire critical IT infrastructure. Companies struggle to hire and retain skilled IT personnel. As organizations actively accelerate their digital and cloud transformation strategies, maintaining digital and technological sovereignty is a massive priority. Added to these, data security and compliance in the face of persistent cyberattacks and strict regulatory laws has become more important than ever.

In short, executive and IT managers must figure out how to meet ever-increasing operational and security requirements with less budget, reduced staff, and lower levels of certainty about the immediate future.

Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) can become an important tool to address these challenges. Rapidly becoming a mainstream technology, a fully managed DaaS platform can help businesses attain cost-effectiveness, ease the workload of their IT teams, and ensure data security and compliance.

What is DaaS and how does it work?

DaaS is a desktop computing infrastructure that uses virtual machines to deliver desktop sessions to end users. All virtual desktops and applications are hosted in the cloud, and nothing resides locally.

DaaS makes it possible to deploy virtual desktop sessions quickly, and DaaS infrastructure can scale to support hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of individual users. That’s why businesses across a range of industries – such as healthcare, finance, insurance, professional services, and business process management – are turning to DaaS to:

  • Support remote or hybrid workers.
  • Reduce IT spending through pay-as-you-go pricing models.
  • Enhance data and application security.
  • Increase agility.

How DaaS improves reliability under inflationary pressures

A slowdown in global economic growth, inflation, and IT product costs have significantly increased the financial pressure for organizations across the globe. Most companies likely have less budget to support IT initiatives or maintenance operations. IT leaders now face tremendous pressure to do more with less budget, and are faced with the need to find innovative ways to maximize the ROI of existing IT investments while also making changes that reduce overall IT costs.

DaaS provides enhanced reliability during times of inflation as organizations can launch as many virtual desktops as they need, quickly and easily, without having to rely on hardware procurement. Virtual desktops also provide hassle-free de-provisioning as opposed to traditional desktops, resulting in zero wastage in idle hardware.

The pay-as-you-go subscription model saves cost while ensuring easy scalability – a feature that holds value while organizations gear up to weather the upcoming inflation.

How DaaS overcomes staffing shortages

The competitive hiring market has made it difficult for many IT organizations to hire and retain skilled engineers. Once consequence of IT staffing shortages is that IT teams may no longer be able to maintain the same level of inhouse operations that they traditionally have been doing. Engineers are stretched thinner, leaving less time to spend on work like patching and updating critical systems. The lack of skilled personnel may mean cutting corners when it comes to IT management and support operations.

DaaS helps overstretched IT teams do more with fewer personnel. Instead of desktop support, IT teams can focus on new digitization projects, such as cloud, automation, and data analytics.

With DaaS, IT engineers no longer have to worry about servicing or updating physical desktops. They can rely on DaaS providers to manage their virtual PC infrastructure.

How DaaS enhances security to ensure digital sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is the concept that the data collected and stored in a country is subject to the data laws and governance of that country. Any violation of these regulations will result in massive damages in cost and brand name for organizations.

When it comes to their data, especially sensitive customer data, organizations must have complete control and visibility on where it is stored, how it is used, and who has access to it. Data security (with access control and insulation against cyber threats) and regulatory compliance (varying across the industry) are becoming more challenging daily.

With DaaS, businesses never have to worry that the loss or theft of devices will expose sensitive data. They can also centrally monitor all desktop environments to detect signs of security breaches, and they can harden systems against unauthorized access using techniques like multi-factor authentication.

DaaS also helps organizations ensure compliance and avoid legal risks by giving them complete control over their data.

Anunta’s DaaS value proposition

While DaaS offers clear and distinct benefits of particular value for IT organizations today, the challenge that IT leaders sometimes encounter is the difficulty of getting started with DaaS.

Building a virtual desktop infrastructure from scratch requires a significant investment of staff time and financial resources, both of which are scarce in the typical business today.

Anunta offers a simpler approach. Our fully automated Vendor-Defined DaaS, deploys a new virtual desktop environment in a matter of hours and helps scale up or down easily based on requirements. An enterprise-ready virtual desktop solution, Managed DaaS is not only highly customized and uniquely tailored to enterprise IT requirements, but it also seamlessly integrates existing IT tools and processes, ensuring next to no disruption for the IT staff.

With the end-to-end management of the customer’s virtual environment, Anunta’s DaaS ensures that IT leaders and CXOs can focus more on their digital transformation priorities rather than IT infrastructure and operations, effectively furthering their core business goals.

This is a summary of our Gartner Analyst-validated whitepaper titled “Leveraging DaaS to Thrive in Today’s Cloudy Business Environment”. Download the whitepaper to understand more on why DaaS is the best solution to weather the stormy waters of today’s business.

During the Festival of Lights this year, Anunta celebrated a festival of its own.

As part of our CSR policy, Anunta is committed to giving back to the community and making a tangible difference in the lives of the underprivileged. The many CSR initiatives planned at Anunta are driven by the belief that even the smallest of gestures can make the biggest difference because we have the strength of numbers. Collective action from all Anunta employees has been the biggest force behind the success of each of these initiatives.

In the spirit of Diwali, we decided to spread love, happiness, and joy among the less fortunate as part of our CSR initiatives. Anunta organized ‘Daan Utsav,’ our very own festival of giving. In this two-week-long donation drive across our offices in Mumbai, Chennai, and Bangalore, we urged our colleagues to donate clothes, books, and toys to those in need.

In the two weeks that followed, we received overwhelming response from as our colleagues enthusiastically made their donations.

Why Daan Utsav?

We organized Daan Utsav because the idea of having our own festival of giving aligned well with both our CSR policy as well as the auspicious time of Diwali.

We have been organizing Daan Utsav annually and the response from our colleagues has always been inspiring. It falls under our “Joy of Giving” CSR initiative that is focused entirely on helping the underprivileged through financial and domestic resources.

Daan Utsav was conceptualized to help each employee in Anunta to experience the joy of giving. A drive like this where everyone openly participates helps us induct new employees into the “giving experience”. It also instils a sense of belonging in them, being part of a large corporate initiative with very tangible results.

A word about our partner, Goonj

For Daan Utsav, we partnered with Goonj, an NGO that undertakes disaster relief, humanitarian aid, and community development in 23 states across India. Headquartered in New Delhi, Goonj channels unused materials in urban homes to remote villages, distributing them among the deserving. They have built a strong, successful network of communities from urban to rural India, channelizing crucial and basic resources like clothes, food, books, etc. to address the gaps in education and livelihood.

Goonj’s model of development bridges the gap between the urban and rural communities, while creating a more inclusive and involved economy.

Goonj was the ideal partner for us in our Daan Utsav, as they source under-utilized resources from urban homes as tools for rural development, helping the less fortunate to live with dignity. Our collections through Daan Utsav would become crucial tools in building a comfortable life for the deserving.

The inspiring success of Daan Utsav

Daan Utsav was a tremendous success. At the end of two weeks, we collected over 100 boxes of clothes, toys, and books across all locations. Our HR team visited the Goonj offices in all three locations to hand over the donations, which will later be distributed across rural India by our very able partner.

Anunta has a very strong HR policy that is committed towards the upliftment of the underprivileged in our society. Daan Utsav is a great example how dedicated we are as an organization to put all our CSR plans into action.

“The Anunta Daan Utsav initiative was launched on October 2 with a simple request to our colleagues. Do you have any clothes, books, or toys that you would like to donate?” says Amar Salvi, our SVP of HR and Training. “The response from our colleagues across locations was prompt and in just a few days, the boxes were overflowing!”

“I am glad that we could collectively make a difference to the underprivileged through this association with Goonj,” Amar adds. “Looking forward to many such drives in 2023.”

“36% of manufacturing enterprises realize above average business value from IT spending in digitalization when compared with peers,” says a Gartner report on how advanced manufacturing companies are now capitalizing on the latest technology trends to drive value.

One of these technology tools that has been adding consistent value to manufacturing businesses is Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). In fact, the need for cost-effective digital transformation is already driving the industry towards desktop virtualization. The desktop virtualization market in manufacturing is expected to register a CAGR of 9.3% over the forecast period of 2021 – 2026.

A crucial advantage that DaaS brings in for the manufacturing industry is the massive time saving in device procurement and the subsequent cost saving. Manufacturing businesses heavily rely on devices with high-end specifications for their graphics professionals to develop CAD models and complex engineering simulations. These specifications vary based on project requirements, which is where the long road to hardware procurement begins. With DaaS, this road becomes much shorter.

How does DaaS tackle the IT hardware challenges in the manufacturing industry?

Anunta recently helped one of India’s leading steel manufacturing companies in addressing the twin challenges of time and cost involved in device procurement for their graphics team.

The customer had multiple projects which depended on devices with high-end graphics specifications. While the smooth execution of the project relied on these end user devices, there were multiple challenges associated with it.

One was the massive amount of time spent on device procurement. Because of the highly specific hardware configurations, this followed a long process that involved understanding the specifications, inviting bids from OEMs, finalizing the brand, procuring the end user device, installing the required software, and shipping the device to the end user. The average time taken for device procurement and deployment was a minimum of 6 weeks.

Apart from the time and cost involved in device procurement, another challenge lay in de-provisioning the device at the completion of the project. Since each project came with varying hardware specifications, device repurposing was a rare scenario, resulting in idle resources.

Anunta was able to help mitigate these challenges by moving the manufacturer to a DaaS infrastructure, specifically Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). By leveraging AVD, we reduced the time taken for device procurement from 6 weeks to just 3 days, even with the high-end specifications. Moreover, we could also ensure hassle-free de-provisioning of virtual machines after project completion, resulting in zero wastage in the form of idle hardware.

The customer also benefitted from a subscription-based model, saving cost, and ensuring easy scalability.

Overall, Anunta was able to improve application availability dramatically with no major IT incidents, ensuring seamless and reliable manufacturing operations and processes.

What are the other benefits that DaaS offers the manufacturing industry?

  • Empowering a distributed workforce: DaaS provides seamless and secure access to real-time data, enhancing workforce efficiency and employee autonomy.
  • Centralizing all data: With data stored in a centralized platform, all stakeholders can access and share data. There’s also minimal risk of data loss as device failure has no impact on the centrally saved data.
  • Enhancing security and compliance: Leading cloud platforms are compliant to all regulatory standards.
  • Improving business agility and continuity: Seamless access to data and applications helps the workforce stay active during crises.

How does DaaS boost the growth of manufacturing businesses?

By eliminating the need to invest heavily in purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading hardware, DaaS contributes directly to the growth of the business. With no major infrastructural constraints, the money can be rightfully invested in other crucial operations for growth and market expansion.

There’s also the hidden advantage that DaaS brings in by enabling businesses in their ESG priorities by reducing carbon footprint and energy consumption. With a large-scale environment involving multiple plants and high-powered equipment, this is one advantage of DaaS that manufacturing businesses can truly leverage.

The manufacturing industry, that has long been tied down because of its massive fleet of on-premises equipment, impeding its digital transformation, can now adapt to the changing times. By simplifying its IT infrastructure and desktop management and eliminating security and cost concerns, DaaS has the potential to effectively boost the digital workplace transformation strategies of manufacturing businesses.

The healthcare sector has been grappling with looming cyber security challenges over the last several years. Healthcare records offer a high-value target for cybercriminals looking to make quick money on the dark web or initiate more focused attacks. Additionally, with lives potentially at stake, caregivers become increasingly vulnerable to disruptive digital acts, including healthcare ransomware attacks.

Healthcare institutes generate tons of data containing confidential and valuable insights. As the industry switches from paper and documents to a digitized setting, the attack surface keeps on expanding. With data being one of the critical pillars, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop as a service (DaaS) are earning good word among caregivers and patients alike.

Fear that critical patient information is always on the line? Keeping up with regulatory changes seems a challenging task? VDI solutions tackle these pressing issues with their innovative security offerings.

In fact, they are silently but rapidly becoming a potential weapon in the cyber security armory against ransomware attacks in healthcare. Ironically, data security and privacy have been a primary tight spot for organizations that delayed their migration to DaaS and VDI solutions. But now, the same leading-edge desktop virtualization technologies are finding use in identifying and combating cybercrimes.

This article explains how healthcare settings can profit from the security benefits of DaaS and VDI services.

Secure Healthcare VDI images

Creating an efficient image implies providing a lightweight VDI solution. Healthcare environments are characterized by numerous divisions in a mix. Hence, building the correct image for each domain is vital. For instance:

  • Executive staff (persistent image)
  • Labs and healthcare contractors (pooled image)
  • Department-based employees (both persistent and pooled images)

Each of these images will have its respective stack of policies focused on the end users. Accordingly, healthcare IT can deliver applications through user cohorts, and these images can remain light and clean.
By designing secure master golden images, IT admins can define updates to a single master image (in the respective division) and update that instance. Based on that, a reboot cycle for all the secondary images pointing to the master will make way for updates. Such management helps streamline a controlled VDI deployment.

Avoid Downtime during Crises

Like any other industry, downtime also translates to a loss of business in healthcare too. During system downtime, medical practitioners cannot respond to patient complaints, follow up on leads, or deliver care.
In healthcare, more than money is at risk. If computer systems are suspended, staff cannot book emergency appointments, and doctors and nurses cannot confirm medications or procedure timings. Eventually, lives are on the line.

During natural disasters such as a fire outbreak or floods, paper documents could get lost, compromised, or tattered. If the equipment has sustained damages, medical records saved on-premise might also get lost. Computers can freeze amidst a task, resulting in unsaved documents and lost progress.

DaaS keeps healthcare records in independent, centralized servers in real-time. As such, the odds of data loss with onsite files or hard copies reduce when medical staff save information on the cloud.

Besides, VDI solves general problems, such as load balancing, which often leads to standstills. If a single server fails to manage a process, DaaS vendors distribute the demand over multiple servers, ensuring healthcare institutes do not short-circuit during peak times.

Stricter Authorization to Avert Ransomware in Healthcare

An inquiry revealed that a Huntington Hospital (the US) employee grabbed the records of 13,000 patients without access permission. The now-former employee has been convicted of a criminal HIPAA offense. Worse, the hospital had to provide one-year complimentary identity theft protection services as prevention.

In most healthcare ransomware attacks, security loopholes occur from internal sources, including disgruntled workers or contractors who want to access the systems for vested interests. To avoid critical medical records from falling into the hands of suspicious people, healthcare needs more than a simple password approach. Simply put, a comprehensive VDI role-based access control (RBAC) matrix.
DaaS-based RBAC grants resource access to medical staff on a need-to-use basis according to their roles at the healthcare facility. This approach to identity and access management (IAM) allows only those with valid reasons to log into the virtual servers without compromising patient privacy.

Those with permission to use virtual desktops will require approval via digital certificates, biometrics interaction, or multi-factor authentication (MFA) before accessing relevant data to perform their duties.

Data Encryption as an Additional Security Layer

Private sensitive details, including protected health information (PHI) and electronic health records (EHR), are among the popular prizes for threat actors. Therefore, the guidelines for caregivers analyzing patients’ data entail stringent data protection requirements that come with hefty fines if not fulfilled.

Perimeter security approaches, such as firewalls, to strengthen the cyber security fabric are no longer capable enough to thwart today’s healthcare ransomware attacks. Complementing them with VDI’s data encryption feature is a must in a layered approach to data security.

Whenever EHRs float across multiple systems, their confidentiality and integrity become vulnerable to various risks – Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, accidental exposure, and insider threats. Encrypting them in transit, mostly via the transport layer security (TLS) protocol, protects from many of these cyber risks.

Encryption encodes EHRs and PHI in such a way that only legitimate users can access them. It denies unauthorized third parties who do not have the required decryption key from reading or modifying classified information. In other words, even if a would-be interceptor physically nabs a server with encrypted information, that data remains completely undecipherable without the correct secret key.

Encryption does not guarantee the integrity of PHI – at rest and in transit. That said, as data is in constant evolution, healthcare settings can leverage it to check their backup integrity.

Frequent Security Patches and Updates

Unpatched software is among the primary reasons behind ransomware attacks in healthcare globally. Network threats are continuously evolving as malicious actors keep innovating their intrusion tactics. Cybercriminals often exploit critical security holes only a few hours after a software’s public launch. For small- and medium-scale healthcare centers, keeping software updated without triggering serious operation disturbances is challenging.

As such, regular software and app updates are crucial to boost the protection of confidential resources from potential healthcare ransomware attacks. Conventional IT security models do not execute timely updates or as often as necessary, thus exposing healthcare data and networks to digital intrusions.

DaaS vendors regularly install patches for their clients (healthcare settings), who can continue leveraging the cloud services without operational downtime. This reduces their chances of becoming victims of ransomware and saves them time in the process. When the staff reside in remote locations, VDI software solutions help ensure all employees are up-to-date and remain productive.

Secure Data Access from a Single Location

Moving healthcare data to DaaS allows medical staff to accumulate diverse databases in a single place. No doubt, the bulk of patients’ data is safeguarded. However, saving them in multiple sources – hard drives, spreadsheets, and hard copies – keeps petty items, such as a post-surgery note or a prescription, at the risk of getting misplaced or lost.

Storing medical records in a DaaS infrastructure opens new avenues for data management and integration (DMI) protocols. DMI is a complicated and evolving area. Simply put, it incorporates procedures and policies that companies implement to ensure that the right people have timely access to accurate information.

For hospitals and clinics, having plain and updated records is paramount before service providers shift or merge them with other data. If errors occur, for instance, in medical histories, patient details, prescriptions, or financial information, the healthcare institute can end up draining piles of cash and public backlash. Not to mention the physical harm if patients do not receive accurate treatment.

DaaS to Make Healthcare Cyber Security Smarter

Safeguarding critical resources in virtual servers is not only an IT issue but a paramount aspect of overall business strategy. The continuous rise in the sophistication of ransomware attacks in healthcare has influenced caregivers to realize the security benefits of the DaaS architecture.

Besides, the recent ransomware attack at the Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health is evident enough that cyber security intrusions continue to plague the healthcare system. Hence, organizations are inviting IT security pros to boardroom discussions for a well-thought-out security roadmap.

Today, virtual desktops are gradually replacing desktop setups in healthcare institutes. The perks end-users get to experience are hardware-agnostic desktop access, easy IT maintenance, better data security, and so on. Moreover, the security advances that VDI services boast are motivating healthcare that has been reluctant to embrace the technology to at least reassess their feasibility.

The intertwined nature of providing care reflects how an attack on one section of healthcare organizations can trigger a domino effect. While DaaS is not the silver bullet against ransomware in healthcare, it will keep classified medical resources organized and as secure as possible.

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