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.
As a recognized specialist in implementing end-user computing solutions, Anunta has implemented some of the most varied use cases across industry verticals. Anunta offers a structured adoption plan with complete ownership of the EUC transformation from discovery and migration to complete stabilization of the environment.
Delivered through its state of the art, highly secure network operations center, Anunta successfully manages 80,000+ end-points for 120,000+ end-users globally while ensuring an application availability of 99.98%.
Focus on Compliance & Security
Due to the dramatic increase in the risk of identity theft and security breaches, enterprises need to adhere to strict regulations, local laws, and protocols.
Managed DaaS providers should ensure compliance with the organization’s security guidelines, local device directives, cloud-related industry mandates, government ordinances, licensing, and group policies. A structured process to proactively implement security measures to prevent malware intrusions, ransomware attacks, data cross-contamination, and hacking will help to avoid any data leaks from the organization.
The MDP should have organized processes to implement security access, define user roles and group memberships for security and compliance during designing of the DaaS architecture.
Anunta implements established protocols and procedures, periodic risk assessments and external audits, KPI measurement, recertification audits and regular surveillance in line with ISMS and ISTM certifications and HIPAA-compliance.
End-to-End Support
In a newly virtualized environment, factors like patch upgrades, security updates, change management, troubleshooting, and monitoring of cloud desktop environments are critical. The Managed DaaS provider should ensure that these factors are consistently and promptly addressed to ensure consistency in operation and enhanced end-user experience.
The availability of 24×7 monitoring and support by the MDP can ensure the infrastructure is up and running at all times without business disruption. Proactively identifying performance, capacity, and configuration issues with the availability of helpdesk, is necessary to ensure quick resolution of issues.
The MDP should have the ability to manage all incidents and perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to prevent recurrence of issues. The MDP should work towards continually to improve performance and minimize the impact of change-related incidents on service quality.
As an end to end implementation and managed services provider, Anunta enables its customers through a metric-driven approach to deliver an unmatched end-user experience. Anunta’s Managed Services offerings include, smart monitoring through its patented AIOps platform – EuVantage, a 24×7 service desk, and a team of experts to deal with incident-, problem-, change-, and patch-management.
Backup & Disaster Recovery
Outages, natural calamities, or data center failures are unexpected issues that adversely impact business continuity. The Managed DaaS provider should implement failover mechanisms, to enable users to work with minimum downtime. The ability to provide Back-up and Disaster recovery facilities will maintain business continuity.
Since end-users use their own devices while working from home or remote areas, the Managed DaaS Provider should empower end-users to work from anywhere and on any device. The MDP should also specify if Backup and Disaster recovery facility is an integral part of their offering. Any additional fee for backup and disaster recovery should be disclosed at the proposal stage.
Anunta’s systems are configured for automatic backup to ensure business continuity avoiding disruption to operations. Anunta incorporates latest BYOD trends, thereby facilitating remote usage using different devices.
Commercial vs. Absolute Value
The MDP should present different pricing models based on number of users and resources utilized such as per user per month pricing or pay as you go model, and fixed cost. When evaluating commercial proposals, enterprises should focus on the potential impact of outcomes like higher application availability, improved service levels, consistency of performance, ease-of-management, and immersive end-user experience rather than the stated service cost.
The MDP should demonstrate complete transparency in presenting pricing vs. absolute value. They should ensure a reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by eliminating associated and hidden costs. The focus should be on converting CAPEX expenditure to OPEX model with an outcome-oriented SLA.
Anunta delivers its customers more than 99.98% application availability and resolves most incidents before they impact the users. Anunta offers productivity-oriented SLAs along with flexible commercial model – Per-user/month or Per Endpoint/Month or Pay as you go.
Taking the final decision
The process of choosing a Managed DaaS Provider should include immense planning and foresight from a long-term perspective. Onboarding the right provider means enterprises can expect a superior user experience with zero business disruption while gaining significant savings on the cost. Enterprise should prepare their own custom checklist based on the criteria discussed earlier in the paper to evaluate a provider that will ensure uninterrupted operations and deliver a superior end-user experience.
Anunta Technologies is a recognized specialist in end to end DaaS implementation and management, and always focused on delivering a great end-user experience. With deep domain expertise, our team of experts designs sustainable EUC roadmaps that solve the unique challenges of your business, opening up a world of possibilities.
Learn more about our solutions and services at https://www.anuntatech.com.
