Story of the Week

For IT teams, giving workforces the resources they need to thrive has never been harder than it is today. The pivot toward hybrid and remote work – which more than three-quarters of businesses have embraced, according to Gallup – is only part of the reason. Pervasive cybersecurity threats and ongoing economic uncertainty have also contributed to the pressure that IT organizations face in delivering secure, cost-effective solutions that workforces can access from anywhere.

Fortunately, there’s an offering that can meet all these challenges: Desktop-as-a-Service, or DaaS. We’re excited to showcase Anunta’s fully managed DaaS offering at VMware Explore 2022, focused on supercharging the digital workforce transformations that businesses across the world are currently undergoing.

The Age of Workplace Uncertainty

To understand why DaaS has become so crucial to business success, you must understand just how radically the workplace has changed in a relatively short period of time. Several key disruptors have emerged in recent years:

• The adoption of remote and hybrid work models, in which employees operate off-site on a routine basis.
• A massive surge in cybersecurity attacks and risks, which have never been as prevalent as they are today.
• Economic instability due to high inflation rates, rising borrowing costs and limited capital.

On their own, each of these trends might not lead to major upheaval for the way businesses manage their workforces. But the fact that all these disruptions are taking place at the same time has led to massive challenges for IT organizations.

Being able to provide IT services to remote and hybrid workers is hard enough. But it’s even worse when those resources need to be hardened against the ever-increasing risk of cyberattack.

At the same time, many organizations need to support remote and hybrid workforces in a resource-constrained environment, which means they must make smart financial decisions about where and how they deploy IT resources. They can’t just toss money at modern workplace challenges until they disappear, because there’s not as much money to toss around as there was before the current economic downturn.

The Role of DaaS in Workplace Transformation Success

At VMware Explore, Anunta experts will come together to showcase how Desktop-as-a-Service can help businesses meet each of the above challenges in order to achieve successful workplace transformation.

By allowing businesses to replace traditional PCs with cloud-based virtual desktops, DaaS makes it easy to build desktop infrastructure for the modern digital workplace. With DaaS, it doesn’t matter where your workers are physically located or when they choose to work. They can access cloud-based desktop sessions from anywhere, using any local device.

From a security perspective, too, DaaS not only meets, but surpasses, the security standards of traditional, in-office PCs. DaaS provides robust access controls and encryption for network traffic. It also virtually eliminates the risk that physical security breaches (such as the theft of laptops) could place business data at risk, because data always remains inside the data centers that host DaaS sessions.

As for cost, DaaS allows companies to deploy flexible desktop infrastructure for modern workforces at a low cost. The monthly cost for fully managed DaaS services is as low as $40 per user – much less than the TCO of purchasing traditional PCs and paying IT staff to manage and support them on an ongoing basis.

Plus, because DaaS platforms offer pay-as-you-go pricing, there is no need for businesses to invest precious capital in purchasing PC infrastructure upfront. They can use an OpEx model instead – an especially valuable benefit in the context of today’s economic uncertainty.

Managed and Packaged DaaS: The Easy Way to Run Cloud Desktops

You may be thinking: “DaaS sounds great, but isn’t it a lot of work to deploy and manage it? I can’t replace my traditional desktop infrastructure overnight!”

That’s a fair point. Designing, configuring, and supporting DaaS environments can be challenging. Not only does DaaS require mastery of technologies like desktop virtualization services, but you must also tailor your DaaS environment for your use cases if you want to achieve the best performance, cost, and security.

That’s why, at Anunta, we do all of this work for our customers as part of our fully managed customized DaaS and packaged DaaS offerings. We design DaaS environments based on each customer’s unique needs, then implement and manage those environments on an ongoing basis. In exchange for predictable, transparent pay-as-you-go pricing, our clients get turnkey DaaS services that keep their workforces productive and happy while minimizing the burden on IT departments.

Learn More at VMware Explore

For full details on how the workplace is changing and how managed DaaS helps businesses rise to the challenge of digital workplace transformation, come see us at VMware Explore from Aug. 29-Sept. 1 at booth #1818. Don’t forget to catch our session, “Demystifying DaaS: Easily Enable a Hybrid Workforce,” which takes the audience through the benefits of DaaS and the freedom and flexibility it provides to the digital workplace.

We hope to see you later this month in San Francisco!

There’s no denying it. From a security perspective, hybrid work can be a nightmare. From the physical security threats that arise when employees store sensitive data on off-site devices that could be stolen, to the risk of passing data over insecure home networks, businesses with hybrid workforces face a whole host of security challenges that simply didn’t apply when everyone worked from the office.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Desktop-as-a-Service, or DaaS, can shore up many of the security issues associated with hybrid work. By replacing traditional desktop computers with cloud-based virtual desktops, DaaS removes one of the core risks of hybrid work – insecure PCs – while simultaneously delivering benefits like higher productivity and enhanced workforce scalability.

It’s unsurprising, then, that 64 percent of IT leaders who responded to a recent Citrix survey agreed that DaaS is a “key factor” in their organizations’ approaches to securing hybrid work. The survey also found that improving security for hybrid workforces was the top business benefit that respondents associated with DaaS. Advantages like cost savings and improved business continuity were on the list, too, but they took a back seat to security.

To understand why so many IT leaders see DaaS a pillar of hybrid work security, let’s look at the major security challenges of hybrid work, and how DaaS addresses them.

Top Security Challenges of Hybrid Work

When businesses embrace hybrid work models – meaning ones in which employees work partly from the office, and partly from remote locations – they inevitably subject themselves to new types of cybersecurity risks.

The specific security challenges of hybrid work will vary depending on factors like which types of systems a business uses and where remote workers are based, but the risks generally fall into three main categories:

• Data security: It’s harder to secure sensitive information when the information is stored on devices that are not located in the office. The risk of physical security breaches is higher. So is the risk that malware running on a remote worker’s PC could access sensitive business data stored on the PC.
• Network security: Hybrid workforces can’t be protected with corporate firewalls in the same way that businesses secure traditional workforces. Firewalls simply don’t work when employees need to connect from anywhere and the IP addresses of remote endpoints are constantly changing. Solutions like VPNs can help by encrypting data, but as Forbes notes, they are “not a magic solution that prevents all security threats.” For example, malware running on a compromised remote PC could potentially intercept sensitive network traffic even if the PC connects to business systems over a VPN.
• Software security: IT teams can’t efficiently enforce security controls through frameworks like Active Directory if devices aren’t constantly connected to the corporate network. As a result, hybrid workers may be able to install applications that introduce malware or other vulnerabilities to the systems they use when working remotely. Compromised applications could, in turn, access sensitive data that passes through employees’ devices.

The list of hybrid work security challenges could go on, but these points capture the essentials.

How DaaS Protects Hybrid Workforces

When businesses ditch conventional desktops and replace them with DaaS, many of the hybrid work security issues described above go out the window. The main reason why is that when employees no longer rely on insecure desktop computers to work remotely, the data, networking and software security issues associated with desktop computers cease to apply.

In a DaaS-based desktop environment, data never physically leaves the data center where virtual desktops are hosted. That means that physical security risks disappear. In addition, because DaaS separates virtual desktop sessions from the systems that employees use to log in, any malware or other vulnerabilities present on remote workers’ local devices remains isolated from the virtual desktop environments that they use for work.

Network security is much stronger under DaaS, too, because all data passing into and out of virtual desktop environments can be encrypted – even if hybrid workers aren’t connected to a VPN. Network data can also be subjected to firewall filters because virtual desktops can have fixed IP addresses, making it possible to deploy many of the same network-level security controls that would be in place on a traditional corporate network.

As for software security, modern DaaS platforms allow IT teams to establish whichever security rules they need to govern which software is allowed to run inside corporate desktop environments. Virtual desktops remain constantly connected to central software security and monitoring systems, regardless of whether employees are logged in or not, or where they connect from.

DaaS – A Pillar of Hybrid Workforce Security

To be sure, stronger end-user security is only one of the many benefits that DaaS delivers. Virtual desktops also provide business advantages like the ability to add desktop sessions quickly when new employees are hired, predictable monthly pricing and a significant reduction in the amount of time and effort required to administer desktop systems.
An added advantage that comes with DaaS is the flexibility it brings to employers and employees alike. While employees have the flexibility to work from anywhere – home or office – it gives employers the flexibility to hire employees even in locations where the organization has no physical presence. Unburdened by geographical limitations, DaaS also helps organizations in optimizing their office space. As for employee experience, with less time spent in commute and proper work-life balance, DaaS results in enhancing it, resulting in higher productivity.

Arguably, however, DaaS’s ability to secure hybrid workforces is one of the very most important reasons why businesses today should embrace cloud-based virtual desktops. In a world where nearly three-quarters of businesses in the U.S. have already pivoted to hybrid work or expect to do so, the security risks associated with hybrid workers who rely on traditional desktops are not going to go away on their own.

But they will disappear for companies that embrace DaaS, which provides a fundamentally more secure means of giving hybrid workers the desktop computing infrastructure and applications they need to be both productive and secure, no matter where they are based.

The latest Gartner report mentioning Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is out, and we love it for two reasons.

One is that the report, titled “Hype Cycle™ for Digital Workplace Infrastructure and Operations, 2022,” identifies DaaS as one of new innovations that businesses need to thrive in the age of distributed workforces and economic uncertainty.* (We’ll also modestly point out that the report named Anunta as a “Sample Vendor for DaaS,” but that’s beside the point.) We think, DaaS is indeed critical in an age when businesses need to provide secure, scalable desktop environments to remote workers.

The second reason we love the report is that it points to several key “obstacles” to DaaS adoption – including cost, management complexity and software licensing challenges – that we believe Anunta’s DaaS offerings are uniquely suited to solve. While we agree that problems like these may present issues for the DaaS ecosystem as a whole, we are confident that we stand apart because we offer solutions to these challenges as part of our core DaaS products.

Let us explain by providing what Gartner says about DaaS and describing how Anunta stands apart in the world of cloud desktops and virtual desktop infrastructure.

Gartner’s Take on DaaS in 2022

In July 2020, Gartner estimated that DaaS will have the most significant growth that year, identifying it as the fastest-growing segment of the cloud computing ecosystem.**

We consider, the latest Gartner report to include detailed study on DaaS confirms that that growth was not a short-lived trend. The report found that DaaS “revenue grew by 68% in 2021, compared to 2020, and 98% in 2020, compared to 2019 as clients adopted DaaS to secure distributed work”. It also said that DaaS remains critical in the post-pandemic economy because it “enables business continuity and anywhere operations for home-based and hybrid home-office operations.”

In short, we believe, there’s a lot of momentum surrounding DaaS at the present moment, as well as a bright future for DaaS going forward. Businesses that have already shifted some operations to cloud-based desktops will likely be looking to expand their DaaS footprints further, while those not yet taking advantage of DaaS will be increasingly likely to do so.

Challenges to DaaS Adoption

That said, as per the report, Gartner does believe that businesses must overcome a number of obstacles in order to leverage DaaS effectively. The largest obstacles include:

• Cost: Usually the business case turns positive only when security, business and user costs are included.
• Organizations struggling with changes to move financial models from capex to opex.
• GPU use cases can be extremely expensive, preventing migration of some workloads that are highly graphical.
• Multimedia streaming, web meetings and video call performance in DaaS are not equivalent to that of a physical endpoint.
• Performance issues that occur in DaaS because application architectures introduce network-related issues (i.e., latency and hairpinning).
• Some DaaS solutions require complex configuration, which, although simpler than VDI, can in some cases require careful configuration and selection of appropriate storage services to ensure a performant DaaS experience.
• Complex desktop management requirements may not be completely fulfilled by DaaS providers.
• Microsoft license terms that prevent the installation of Microsoft 365 applications on DaaS running on Alibaba, Amazon, or Google clouds.

Even with these challenges, Gartner says, “DaaS will continue to mature and increase in adoption through 2025.”

How Anunta Solves DaaS Obstacles

We’re happy to say that the DaaS obstacles that Gartner identifies in this report are non-issues for Anunta DaaS customers.

When it comes to cost, Anunta keeps DaaS expenses low by allowing businesses to share a single virtual desktop environment among multiple users. Customers can also pick and choose from a variety of different configuration options and service add-ons, so they get exactly what they need, without paying for what they don’t. In this way, Anunta’s DaaS and virtual desktop offerings deliver highly cost-effective solutions.

From a performance standpoint, the fact that Anunta can set up and manage DaaS environments running on virtually any type of infrastructure ensures that our customers can run whichever workloads they need. Unlike some DaaS providers, we don’t restrict customers to a particular cloud or certain types of servers. Instead, we determine which workloads our clients need to run on their cloud desktops, then decide which types of infrastructure are best for hosting the desktops. This means our customers never have to compromise on performance in order to gain the convenience of DaaS.

That flexibility also allows us to overcome the licensing restrictions that apply to DaaS. Because we can set up DaaS anywhere, our customers never need to worry that they won’t be able to use certain software in their DaaS environments due to software licensing.

Finally, as for management, Anunta offers complete “day 2” DaaS support operations in addition to DaaS design and implementation. We assume full responsibility for DaaS monitoring, software patching, change management, incident troubleshooting and more. Our can focus on using their desktop infrastructure, not trying to manage its complexity.

Conclusion: Sustaining the DaaS Momentum

While we agree that the DaaS market as a whole faces challenges related to DaaS cost, performance and management, we also know from experience that all of these obstacles can be overcome. We solve them every day for our customers, and we look forward to continuing to do so as more and more businesses turn to DaaS to enable help optimize their digital workplace infrastructure.

*Gartner, “Hype Cycle for Digital Workplace Infrastructure and Operations, 2022”, Autumn Stanish, Pankil Sheth, Stuart Downes, July 21, 2022.

**Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Revenue to Grow 6.3% in 2020”, June 2020. This press release is more than 12 months old and the Gartner stat is mentioned does not reflect the current market position. It is only added for historical reference.

GARTNER and HYPE CYCLE are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 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 or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory 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.

In today’s unpredictable business world, ensuring a cost-efficient, secure, and effective way to support remote/hybrid workforces has become the need of the hour for every organization. Fortunately, Microsoft has helped negotiate some complexities with its year-old offering = Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). Whether letting employees work from home, managing several flex spaces pan-region, or onboarding people across continents, AVD offers businesses the same desktop experience as in the offices without using multiple apps and log-ins.

We have data that cement AVD’s credibility in today’s workplace transformation. A Forrester Consulting study (commissioned by Intel and Microsoft) finds that businesses can:

• Trim Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) licensing and infrastructure expenses by almost a third.
• Cut down their IT expenses for installation, maintenance, and management by 59%.
• Boost productivity by around 22 human hours through better connectivity, security response, and staff hiring.

In this article, we will explain how AVD is making inroads into various industries.

Manufacturing Industry – AVD Helps Shrink Hardware Costs

In manufacturing, production costs consume the bulk of the budget. Higher costs translate to lesser profit margin and eventually lesser market share. Besides, the industry houses a high volume of workers, unlike typical office-based jobs. These workers barely need to turn to IT devices at the same time.

In such circumstances, AVD can help manufacturing businesses boost their profits and bottom line. The virtualization tech enables employees to log into their persistent virtual desktops from the same machine when they need to get started. This means that manufacturing firms can operate with fewer devices with AVD. This significantly caps software and hardware costs without keeping enterprises’ security posture at stake.

BFSI Industry – AVD Adds Muscle to IT Security

Banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) firms are always security-conscious, and for a valid reason, as digital intrusions into financial institutions can cost millions (or at times billions) of dollars. Worse, even a single cyber-attack weakens consumers’ trust over the long run and compels potential customers to look for other financial service companies.

Azure Virtual Desktop protects financial institutions from costly breaches by securing all confidential employee and customer data. Case in point, AVD enables IT crews to deploy PCI-DSS-approved (Payment Card Industry-Data Security Standard) devices. These virtual devices are accessible from any remote system securing data transfer and operations even if contract-based workers are performing them. Furthermore, BFSI companies can restrict user activity on a virtual machine (VM) in order to prevent unauthorized access to or transfer of information.

Legal Industry – AVD Keeps a Check on Cyberattacks

Like BFSI service providers, law firms are also soft targets for threat actors, given the amount of cash and classified data they preserve. As such, legal companies are always in dire need of secure, high-throughput systems that can access and store data reliably. Thanks to AVD’s multi-layered security features, law firms can strengthen their cybersecurity walls, thus slashing the odds of enduring cyberattacks. At the same time, employees can access critical documents no matter where they are or what device they are using and keep up with the ever-changing work demands.

Education – AVD Facilitates BYOD Experiences

Technology has become indispensable to educational institutions, particularly in the post-COVID economy. Particularly in schools, assigning devices and systems to each student is challenging as updating the hardware is a cost-intensive affair.

Moreover, effective learning demands high-end machines. Unfortunately, not all educational establishments can afford computers with the latest features. Although some schools allow students to learn from their devices, also called bring your own device (BYOD), this can pose serious security threats.

AVD helps colleges and schools install and run VMs with up-to-the-minute software without squandering on hardware. And they can achieve this with reduced computing power as the processing power sprouts from the VDI. Likewise, in the case of BYOD programs, AVD offers teachers and professors an eagle-eye view of students’ activities, regardless of the device in use. Further, these end-user devices receive the same optimized security as an institution-issued system.

Healthcare Industry – AVD Helps Remain Compliant

Data confidentiality is a pillar of all industries, and healthcare is no exception. Strict norms, like the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), mandate healthcare institutions to preserve patient and staff records. As such, keeping this information in insecure systems is a ticking time bomb. If any data leak occurs, the healthcare organization will have to bear hefty penalties while losing its authenticity.

With Azure Virtual Desktop, healthcare businesses can define permissions and rules, giving access to classified data to only specific stakeholders. Moreover, no data resides in the devices but instead on Azure cloud. Microsoft Azure boasts some of the most reliable data repositories, further complemented by multi-factor authentication and comprehensive threat management to ensure all relevant records are in safe places.

Given the feature-rich stack, AVD helps make devices and systems in healthcare organizations compliant, thus freeing up IT admins from worrying about local data storage and security practices.

Bring Sea Changes in the IT Fabric with AVD

Looking to power up remote or hybrid work? Azure Virtual Desktop can come to the rescue. Enterprises, irrespective of the sector, deploying AVD is well-placed to enjoy umpteen benefits in the form of flexibility, security, scalability, and cost savings.

Companies should examine their existing needs to decide whether AVD can be the missing piece of their IT infrastructure puzzle. A better option: connect with a managed service provider (MSP) like Anunta.

Anunta is a leading and credible Managed Desktop as a Service provider that offers a wide range of solutions and services related to Enterprise DaaS (Anunta Desktop360), Packaged DaaS, and Digital Workspace technology. Anunta’s team has over 10 years of experience in this field and has successfully migrated over 600,000+ remote desktop users to the cloud. To learn more about AVD, its benefits, and our services, consult with our industry experts.

In its latest Market Guide for Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Gartner projects that the global DaaS market will grow by more than 250% between 2021 and 2024.

The rapid adoption of hybrid and remote working has constituted this increase in demand for DaaS by making it a priority for organizations around the globe. The surge of DaaS adoption also results from business efforts to reduce the cost of desktop infrastructure, especially in a time of ongoing economic uncertainty. Improving desktop security in order to meet increasingly rigid compliance and privacy requirements is another factor driving massive interest in DaaS.

DaaS’s ability to simplify desktop management and support services, too – and by extension, to reduce the burden placed on IT teams – also reinforces the value that DaaS brings to business today.

As such, DaaS presents one of the richest business opportunities available to resellers and managed service providers today.

Anunta DaaS Partner Program: An Easy Onramp to the DaaS Market

Planning, implementing, and supporting DaaS infrastructure present deep challenges, even for experienced IT resellers and service providers.

Anunta’s DaaS Partner Program is purpose-built to provide resellers and managed service providers with an easy means of offering white-labeled DaaS solutions to their clients in any industry. By working with Anunta, the MSP partners gain access to all the resources they need to deliver profitable DaaS products, without having to build, maintain, or support them themselves.

Since Anunta’s DaaS provides on-demand virtual desktops hosted on any public cloud, or on customers’ on-premises infrastructure using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology from vendors including Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, it gives partners creative ways to win customers from any business vertical.

Capitalizing on the enormous opportunity presented by the DaaS market can be quite easy as an Anunta DaaS partner. Let’s take a look at the benefits of the program.

1. Maximize Your Recurring Revenue

Because of the projected market growth, DaaS is an excellent offering for resellers and service providers who want to build steady recurring revenue streams. When well designed, implemented, and managed, DaaS offerings will yield multi-year customer contracts that ensure ongoing revenue.

As an Anunta DaaS partner resellers and MSPs can gain access to the expertise they need not to just get started with DaaS, but to create a DaaS offering that maximizes revenue and profitability, no matter which industries they work in or which type of customers they support.

2. Deliver a DaaS Solution Quickly and Easily

Building a DaaS offering from scratch requires having to master a range of technologies, such as VDI-oriented virtualization platforms and cloud desktop platforms. There is also the necessity to set up unique processes for supporting and updating DaaS environments. Resellers and MSPs will also need to design, implement, and manage the infrastructure that powers their DaaS offering.

As an Anunta DaaS partner, resellers and MSs can deploy a complete DaaS offering to their customers with minimal investment of time and resources. Anunta provides not just the DaaS platform, but also the proprietary intellectual property and advanced automation tools that resellers and service providers need to make production-ready DaaS solutions available to their customers.

3. Maximize End User Satisfaction

Without a rock-solid DaaS platform and the specialized expertise necessary to support it, delivering on end-user expectations can be a real challenge.

Being an Anunta DaaS partner, you can bank on reliability uptime rates of 99.98% or higher, which translates to high end-user satisfaction. This, in turn, helps resellers and service providers improve customer retention rates and ensure reliable streams of recurring revenue.

4. Access Specialized DaaS Expertise

For more than a decade, Anunta has specialized in designing, implementing, and supporting VDI and DaaS environments for companies around the globe, equipping us with the necessary expertise to address every business’s unique requirements. And as an Anunta DaaS partner, you’ll have ready access to the guidance and evaluation services you need to tailor your DaaS offerings to each of your customers.

5. Leverage DaaS Sales and Marketing Resources

Unlike other IT services and products, DaaS is not a category with which many businesses are familiar. As such, marketing and selling DaaS products could be a challenge.

As an Anunta DaaS partner, resellers and MSPs get special access to sales and marketing tools, which will help them build awareness, find qualified buyers, and effectively close deals. Our joint go-to-market campaigns also help expose your brand to customers who otherwise might not know about you or your offerings.

6. Stand Apart in the DaaS Market

With the growth of the DaaS market, the chances that you will have heavy competition is high and standing apart in the market might turn out to be a challenge.

As an industry-trusted DaaS provider with 10+ years of experience, Anunta is uniquely positioned to help our partners scale their VDI business with programs that align with their business models, thus enhancing their brand value. Our record-setting levels of reliability, performance, and customer satisfaction act as differentiating factors for your brand.

Conclusion

With the freedom to choose from a variety of offerings to create custom packages and flexible contracts that help you retain total ownership of all your customer relationships, Anunta’s DaaS Partner Program is the ideal way to scale your business while ensuring a recurring stream of revenue.

Read our whitepaper to understand the benefits of the partner program in detail.

If you’re already convinced and want to become a partner, reach out to us at partnerconnect@anuntatech.com and we will get in touch with you.

According to Gartner, the future of IT infrastructure and operations is simple enough to predict. Gartner distills the major themes of modern IT into six basic trends that it says will reshape the way IT organizations approach infrastructure and operations tasks.

If you look closely at those trends, you’ll notice that Desktop-as-a-Service, or DaaS, is a clear solution for operationalizing each of them. Although Gartner doesn’t explicitly point to DaaS (which it has analyzed separately) as a major enabler of innovation in IT infrastructure and operations, it’s clear enough if you read between the lines that DaaS goes hand-in-hand with the future of IT.

To prove the point, let’s walk through each of the six trends that Gartner has identified as being at the core of IT infrastructure and operations innovation, and discuss how DaaS fits into each of them.

1. Anywhere operations

The first trend, which Gartner calls anywhere operations, reflects the need of IT organizations to deploy infrastructure that allows employees to work from anywhere, at any time.

No infrastructure solution achieves this goal better than DaaS. By providing employees with secure desktop environments that they can access from any location with an Internet connection, DaaS lays the foundation for anywhere operations – and, by extension, helps businesses to take full advantage of remote work models.

2. Optimal infrastructure

According to Gartner, businesses are increasingly seeking “optimal infrastructure,” is aimed at “ensuring strong returns for infrastructure investment.”

Although desktop infrastructure is only one component of overall infrastructure spend, DaaS is the obvious solution for optimizing the cost of desktop systems. With DaaS, businesses no longer have to invest in costly on-premises desktop hardware, or the high-effort maintenance operations required to support it. They can simply spin up desktop systems in the cloud on demand.

What’s more, DaaS also lets businesses shift from a CapEx-focused infrastructure spending model to an OpEx model, which brings even more agility to infrastructure budgets.

3. Operational continuity

Gartner says that “IT services must be continuous, regardless of external factors.” That means IT teams need infrastructure that can deliver a flawless, zero-downtime experience.

Achieving this goal with conventional desktop infrastructure is very difficult. Local systems are prone to hardware failure, not to mention issues like the risk of data loss due to failed hard disks, inaccessibility during power outages and so on.

With DaaS, however, operational continuity becomes baked into desktop infrastructure. DaaS systems remain operational – and the data and applications hosted on them remain safe – regardless of what happens to local offices or the devices that employees use to access cloud-based desktop systems. Although it’s still a best practice to back up DaaS systems, the risk of downtime – and, by extension, disruption to business continuity – is fundamentally lower when companies shift to DaaS infrastructure.

4. Core modernization

According to Gartner, modern IT organizations are investing in “core modernization,” which means evolving infrastructure to take advantage of newer technologies.

On the server side of the equation, those technologies may involve innovations like containers and microservices. But from a desktop infrastructure perspective, they should focus on the type of enhancements that DaaS alone can deliver. DaaS brings the same agility, cost-effectiveness and reliability improvements to desktop infrastructure that containers and microservices offer to server-side workloads.

5. Distributed cloud

Distributed cloud, which Gartner defines as “the decentralization of cloud resources,” is another trend that can be operationalized from the desktop perspective through DaaS. With DaaS, local, centralized desktop systems are replaced with flexible virtual desktop environments that can be hosted in any cloud data center – a key advantage for businesses that need to keep data and applications in a specific region in order to meet compliance or privacy goals.

At the same time, however, DaaS makes it easy for IT teams to centralize administration by managing all desktop environments through a central platform. They get the performance and reliability benefits of distributed infrastructure while also enjoying the administrative advantages of centralized management tooling.

6. Critical skills vs. critical roles

The final major infrastructure and operations trend that Gartner points to, which it describes as a shift from “critical roles” to “critical skills,” involves a focus on ensuring that IT practitioners have the broad set of skills necessary to do multiple jobs, rather than designating specific roles for specific tasks.

While this trend involves personnel more than infrastructure itself, businesses that shift to DaaS will find it easier to take a skills-based approach to infrastructure management. The reason why is that with DaaS, desktop infrastructure becomes more consistent and easier to administer. Instead of having to support hundreds of unique desktop computing devices spread across a wide geographic area, IT teams can manage virtual desktop instances running on a standardized, centralized cloud platform.

In this way, DaaS makes desktop support skills easier to obtain, and it significantly lowers the risk that the departure of certain IT staff members will leave businesses unable to support certain systems.

Conclusion

From enabling remote work, to improving infrastructure ROI, to simplifying infrastructure support operations and beyond, DaaS plays a central role in helping businesses to innovate with regard to IT infrastructure and operations. As businesses seek to build better and better IT infrastructures by following the trends Gartner identifies, DaaS should be at the core of their investment strategy.

Technologically speaking, it is pretty cloudy in the healthcare industry. Amid the swarm of life-saving equipment is an invisible force crucial to its operational efficiency: desktop-as-a-service (DaaS). The cloud-enabled technology helps doctors and clinicians deliver personalized patient experiences, work away from desks effortlessly, and slash capital expenditure (CapEx). All these are tremendously beneficial in medicine. This liberty empowers providers to deliver healthcare services – standardized and specialized – in every facility and system, extending the scope of care.

Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare providers have always faced multiple challenges, whether offering consultations to patients from remote locations or preserving protected health information (PHI). COVID-19 further intensified the impact of these issues. In these challenging times, caregivers have found working flexibility in DaaS.

Scroll down to understand how healthcare institutions can boost their overall productivity with DaaS solutions.

Bid Goodbye to Tedious Tasks

DaaS frees up healthcare staff from time-consuming administrative tasks or being tied to a single workstation. The marriage of cloud tech with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities automates repetitive data entry and storage processes. Consequently, day-to-day operations become more specific and organized; put differently, healthcare staff will have more time to focus on dynamic tasks that demand their full attention. The end result: patient care experience improves by notches. Lastly, the twin power of AI and ML bolsters data integrity by reducing errors and improving the accuracy of patient data.

Rapid Data Accessibility Anywhere, Anytime

Doctors and nursing staff are always on the move – from labs, patient rooms, departments, and even offsite visits. DaaS enables these medical practitioners to access patients’ data and useful applications from any location and device, round the clock.

Time is of the essence in healthcare. With DaaS, healthcare professionals can retrieve the information saved in the cloud in a flash. So, rather than hunting through file cabinets, digital data is available on demand. For instance, a specialist or surgeon can review a just-arrived trauma case from their mobile devices on the way to the hospital.

Credit DaaS abilities, telemedicine, and virtual visits have become the new primary care options. Patients suffering from chronic diseases and those undergoing post-operative recovery can now capitalize on online consultations via telehealth apps. These telehealth applications are particularly useful in treating people with infectious diseases – COVID-19 being the most prevalent in the recent past. Healthcare specialists can make proper sense of the information gathered from the surveillance to plan the medication without stepping near the patient.

A Deeper Dive into Patients’ Medical Records

Healthcare data – both structured and unstructured – is a massive resource. With DaaS, doctors and nurses can gather and calculate relevant patient data from multiple sources. Combining the power of big data analytics, AI algorithms, and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, the healthcare staff can conduct medical research based on cloud-stored information.

Case in point, a patient complains of chest pains, cough, and stomach ache. The doctor can then diagnose the problem and input all the relevant details. However, only the primary diagnosis — or may be secondary or tertiary — will flash on the patient’s chart. DaaS-based data analytics helps pull out insights that would otherwise remain concealed. As a sweetener, thoroughly examining PHI helps create more individualized care plans and medical prescriptions for patients.

Grow and Adjust at Ease

DaaS allows healthcare organizations to scale their operations and storage requirements up or down as per season demands or market conditions. As such, they do not need to bear the extraordinary CapEx involved with additional software updates or hardware purchases. Moreover, the CapEx that drains into purchasing and maintaining the entire IT setup is often unreasonable for small-scale healthcare providers. DaaS resources turn those outrageous costs into feasible, pay-as-you-go expenses.

Health centers will ultimately expand in terms of workforce strength, patient flow, and infrastructure. For instance, patient caseloads might shoot during the flu season. So, DaaS systems enable providers to adjust their network and data storage needs to fulfill a short-term rise in service demands. If there is an application that is growing exponentially like electronic health records (EHR) do, it is significantly easier to do in a cloud-native world.

Patient Records are in Much Safer Hands

Any healthcare chief information officer (CIO) knows the importance of adhering to state and national laws, such as HIPAA. In 2021, the US healthcare institutes witnessed data breaches of over 40 million patients . Citing the complexity and stringency of these norms, any leak or loss of PHI invites heavy penalties.

Healthcare centers accumulate and produce colossal data volumes from numerous sources – radiology images, EHRs, and insurance claims. DaaS companies safeguard these critical data stored in healthcare IT systems and servers with high-quality security features like gateway antivirus, corporate-level firewalls, and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS). Besides, they stitch a multi-layered security fabric to protect PHI from digital attacks, such as phishing, malware, and ransomware.

In a cloud-native environment, security is built into new technologies and applications as they are created instead of added on as an afterthought. This strong integration with the underlying cloud framework streamlines the detection of technical defects and/or odd behavior. Moreover, the DaaS provider recommends security fixes or even implements them automatically for healthcare institutions.

Wrapping Up

DaaS has carved out a place for itself in the healthcare IT infrastructure. There are signs that healthcare organizations view the cloud-based solution as a huge – critical – part of their agenda. A study has revealed how DaaS will make at least 3X this decade.

While cynicism around DaaS lingers, its umpteen advantages in healthcare are hard to ignore. Deployment, therefore, is on the upside. Several industries are embracing DaaS as mobile workplaces continue to gain prominence. The healthcare sector stands to enjoy more vital benefits from this mobilization.

Providing more targeted patient care by diligently analyzing their records while at the bedside, on smartphones, or in exam rooms translates to a sought-after healthcare experience. And that is the ultimate goal, anyway.

For more information, do connect with the Desktop-as-a-Service experts at Anunta Tech today!