Story of the Week

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.

“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.

It’s no secret that happy workers are better workers – although if you want proof, check out what IDC says about how a positive employee experience breeds positive customer experiences.

Yet, it has become harder than ever for IT departments to keep workers happy. With more and more employees working remotely, ensuring that workers have access to the computing infrastructure, software, and support services they need to remain productive has become a core challenge for IT teams across the world.

One way to address this challenge is to embrace Desktop-as-a-Service, or DaaS. Because DaaS eliminates many of the friction points separating employees from a positive experience in using IT systems, DaaS helps workers to feel engaged and supported – even when they aren’t physically in the office.

Let me explain by elaborating on the user-experience issues that plague many workforces today, and how DaaS helps solve them.

The role of end-user computing in employee experience

In many respects, desktop computers are the essential link between employees and the companies they work for. No matter which role they play in the business or which systems they need to access, employees rely on desktop computers as their portals into the rest of the organization.

For that reason, desktop computers that result in a clunky experience can easily lead to underproductive, under-engaged, and demoralized employees. And the risks have only become greater as more employees have shifted to hybrid and remote work models since 2020.

Not only are situations like these bad for the business because they reduce productivity and increase the burden placed on IT teams. They’re also bad for employees, who are likely to become frustrated with their jobs and feel under-valued by their employers when they run into desktop computing issues that get in the way of their work.

Let’s also look at some of the most mundane yet significant limitations of traditional desktops:

• Flexibility and mobility: Perhaps one of the most severe restrictions traditional desktops place on their users is the complete lack of mobility. We are talking about one cumbersome device placed in one location, entrusted with securing all data.
• Data loss: Any corruption or damage to the hardware can result in the corruption or loss of data, making its recovery a near-impossibility.
• New software rollouts: In a traditional desktop environment, new software rollouts have to be done using third-party tools, which do not guarantee 100% compliance on day 1.
• Maintenance: Physical desktops – hardware and software – have to be updated and maintained regularly. Desktops may need hardware upgrades and replacements every 3 to 5 years. Operating Systems and software need regular updates for bug fix and security compliance. This maintenance becomes a challenging task in remote and hybrid working environments.
• User experience: While high-end configurations tend to give a better user experience, others not so much. As physical desktops get older, the lower configurations and the age of the hardware contribute to slower performance, resulting in mediocre user experience.

Added to this, there is the very real threat of data loss associated with hardware failure. According to research, hardware failure contributes to 35% of data loss in organizations. If employees have to look over their shoulder everytime they handle a piece of corporate equipment for fear of damage or loss, it will not create a very happy work situation.

How DaaS supercharges employee experience

By using DaaS, businesses can virtually eliminate the risk that end-user computing problems like those described above will harm the employee experience.

With DaaS, on-site and offsite employees are constantly connected by default to the systems that they need to be productive. So, there is never a risk that employees won’t be able to access critical business resources or install the applications they require.

DaaS also ensures that the desktop environments employees work from are lean and mean. Any “cruft” that employees install on local devices remains isolated from virtual desktops, so it won’t slow down business critical applications.

IT support, too, is much faster and more efficient when employees have access to virtual desktops. The IT team can monitor and connect to virtual desktop environments from anywhere, without having to worry about how employees’ home networks are configured. They can access the virtual desktop that the employee uses, since it’s hosted in a server, to perform any maintenance activity like software updates, and operating system patching. Additionally, a VDI environment allows seamless software rollouts with a guaranteed 100% compliance from day 1 for every user.

And, in the event that the devices that employees use to connect to virtual desktops break down, they can simply switch to a different device in order to work around hardware issues. Since all of the data, applications and settings that workers need are stored in the virtual desktop environment, it doesn’t matter which device they use to connect.

Added to these advantages, DaaS provides the freedom to work from anywhere with its location and device-agnostic infrastructure. This mobility is reinforced by the iron-clad security it provides, making data theft or corruption a non-issue for end users.

These benefits are from a digital employee experience perspective. For employers, DaaS empowers their hybrid workspace in other ways:

• It provides a secure hybrid workspace by eliminating the primary source of danger: insecure PCs.
• By creating a seamless work experience for employees, DaaS enhances higher productivity and workforce scalability.
• DaaS addresses all challenges in hybrid work by ensuring data security, network security, and software security.

DaaS: A win for workers and businesses alike

Put simply, DaaS helps to ensure that desktop computing infrastructure becomes a vector for employee efficiency and engagement, rather than a roadblock that separates workers from the business resources they need to do their jobs well. By delivering a smoother end-user computing experience, virtual desktops keep employees happy, while also protecting the needs of the business as a whole.

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.