DaaS – All You Need to Know About Desktop as a Service

What is DaaS?

In simple terms, DaaS, just like SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, is a cloud service that allows users to connect to a virtual desktop from anywhere in the world, provided they are connected to the internet. DaaS is among the best solutions for small and medium businesses for remote working.

Benefits of DaaS

1. A highly reliable and secure solution: DaaS allows users to access their virtual desktops using any device (laptop, smartphone, or tablet, etc.), regardless of where they are physically located. This allows businesses to quickly add new users when they need and adopt the concept of distributed workforce to become future ready. Hosted on the inherently secure cloud, and often complemented with two factor authentication, DaaS allows users to securely access their desktops from anywhere.
2. Disaster recovery: Another key advantage of DaaS is that it mitigates challenges that businesses face in ensuring business continuity in the event of a disaster. Since DaaS provides cloud-hosted desktops, you can be certain that sensitive data and business applications are secure at all times. Additionally, you have the choice to opt for instant infrastructure duplication at any time.
3. Cost-effective:  With DaaS, you only have to pay what you actually use, with monthly or annual subscription models. This helps lower your capital expenses, given that you would have otherwise had to allocate capital to purchase servers, desktop hardware, and licenses. Additionally, when you adopt DaaS, you have more predictable operational expenses.
4. Flexible:  One of the key reasons why enterprises invest in DaaS is because it allows their employees to become more agile and work remotely. With DaaS, employees can access their desktops, applications, and data, via a PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, from anywhere in the world. Thus, DaaS helps you create a more modern workplace.  
5. Agility and scalability: DaaS helps you scale up to meet increases in demand (such as the need to deliver desktop sessions to more employees). Likewise, you can quickly scale down the number of resources you consume if business requirements decrease. Simply put, you can have more hosted desktops available to you during peak seasons, and then return to your original usage pattern once the peak season has ended when you use DaaS.
6. Ensures compliance: Regulatory laws usually dictate how digital data should be stored and managed, and may prevent you from storing data in a certain geographic location. DaaS helps businesses adhere to compliance laws by offering flexibility in terms of data storage. 

VDI vs DaaS – The 5 Key Differences

Now that you know what DaaS is, you are likely wondering what the difference between VDI and DaaS is. The two types of deployments have certain distinct differences. Here’s how they compare:

1. Single-tenant vs multi-tenant
   VDI deployments essentially work on a single-tenant model, where resources are dedicated to a single organization or user. This provides more flexibility to the user and also removes the chance that the resource demands of other users will affect your company’s deployments. In comparison, most cloud desktop services work on multi-tenant models. Here, your company’s service is hosted on a single physical server that is shared with multiple other organizations.
2. Desktop session type
   When it comes to VDI, desktop environments function as virtual sessions on one host operating system. In comparison, in DaaS, different virtual sessions function as separate virtual machines. This means, when you deploy DaaS, you get more isolation between different desktop environments.
3. Historical popularity
   Although both DaaS and VDI technologies have been present for many years now, VDI has witnessed a higher usage rate among businesses. That said, DaaS is now rising in popularity as well and may overtake VDI in terms of usage rates, in the near future.
4. Cost
   VDI deployments typically require substantial upfront expenses. However, VDI does result in long-term savings. In comparison, the DaaS deployments don’t require you to invest too much capital upfront, but you may incur some ongoing subscription fees. With this, you can be assured that you are only spending on resources that you are actually using. For businesses with fluctuating requirements, desktop as a service may be a cheaper option.
5. Agility
    VDI usually takes quite some time to set up and can be challenging to modify once it is established. However, DaaS deployments typically happen a lot faster, thanks to the fact that the platform and infrastructure are already configured. All you need to do is define the users and desktop settings, to get started. 

Use Cases of DaaS

DaaS systems offer benefits to businesses across sectors like Banking, Finance, Healthcare, and more. From offering increased security to reducing overall costs and simplifying regulatory compliance matters, DaaS helps businesses operate more profitably. Here are a few uses cases of the DaaS technology:

– Security and compliance, which are easier to manage using remote desktop sessions.
– Bring your own device (BYOD) policies, which can be reconciled with security requirements by allowing employees to connect to secure, centrally managed DaaS desktop sessions from their own devices. 
– Contractors and temporary workers.
– Remote office workers.
– Field workers .

By providing on-demand access to desktop environments for your workforce, DaaS helps increase the productivity of employees, while also ensuring that all data and applications are stored securely as per the compliance laws in your country.

DaaS – Future Trends

Desktop as a Service has seen increased adoption in key sectors like Banking, Healthcare, Finance, and more. A report from Absolute Markets Insights indicates that the DaaS market is poised to witness a CAGR growth of 20.82% from 2019 to 2027. Gartner forecasts that the total number of DaaS users will grow by more than 150% between 2020 and 2023. This doesn’t come as a surprise given that an increasing number of companies are opting for DaaS to grow their IT operations.

Should You Invest in DaaS or VDI Right Now?

Since you now know the differences between VDI and DaaS, you can decide which of the two technologies to deploy in your organization. Regardless of which technology you intend to use, we can leverage our decade’s worth of experience with virtualization technologies to provide you with a seamless transition to either VDI or DaaS. Reach out to us today to learn more about our offerings!