Desktop as a Service: Business Continuity
Envision IT Pressroom | October 3, 2022
Envision IT Pressroom
October 3, 2022
According to a recent Gallup report gauging the State of the American Workplace, 43% of the workforce now works remotely. A Pew Research Center report states that they are happy at home with 60% of the remote workplace saying that they would like it to stay that way most of the time.
The current post-pandemic work environment has highlighted an increasingly expedited set of tech stack roadmap innovations facing companies globally. Market forces and changing attitudes about the nature of work are driving organizations to look more closely at IT options that provide flexibility, security, and a host of other benefits designed to keep their enterprises competitive.
Today's employees and the burgeoning gig workforce expect access to their work anywhere on any device. Many organizations are considering the value of Desktop as a Service (DaaS) to provide a flexible, secure, scalable, and cost-effective solution to address these business needs.
If your organization is exploring DaaS, you should consider its many benefits, including Business Continuity.
DaaS provides a simpler way to support disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Organizations can quickly enable secure remote access to apps and desktops, which allows the workforce to stay up and running in the event of a natural disaster or other unplanned events. Users can be added quickly, and the organization pays only for what it uses.
Well-run organizations have worked diligently to establish business continuity or disaster recovery plans. They may have their primary location data center and a secondary or co-located facility to allow for quick recovery. Maintaining those "like for like" resources carries a high cost.
Public cloud services like Microsoft Azure, where systems can be recovered or perhaps run in a warm state, can be significantly more cost-effective and beneficial in terms of speed of service, enhanced flexibility, disaster recovery, and security.
When using a service like Azure for Disaster Recovery, if your primary data center fails, users connect to their normal virtual desktops in Azure, and they generally do not see a difference because when they log on to their desktop, everything looks the same.
The task of providing an easy-to-use, flexible, yet secure end-user computing environment has been a challenge since the early days of the first PC. Providing users a desktop with all their needed applications was a nice compromise as it allowed the application to run locally and provided a good user experience.
With the explosion of applications, OS upgrades, security patches, and the need to work remotely the methods of the past no longer address the needs of today. Virtualized Applications and Desktops have solved these challenges, but deploying and managing your own, on-premises virtual platform is a large investment and takes away focus from your business.
With the success of Cloud Computing, we now can take advantage of Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), which gives you all the benefits of Virtualized Applications and Desktops, outsourcing the equipment and management, giving you back the time and resources to focus on your business.
While DaaS solutions are not new, few solutions focus on the end-user experience and security as their main priorities, instead many end up locking you into their platform. This is where Envision partners with Citrix to provide a secure, exceptional user experience while giving you the choice of where your applications and desktops are hosted, whether in the Cloud or even on-premises as your Cloud journey begins.
People have been talking for years that you don't need virtual desktops anymore. What's happening now with security and compliance, the need for flexibility, and work from home, DaaS and its capabilities fill a need in the American workplace more than ever and it is not as complicated nor as expensive as you once thought it was.
So…why Envision IT?
Organizations have a lot of choices when it comes to Managed Service Providers (MSPs.) To answer this important question, let's hear what Beau Smithback, CEO, and Bill Crahen, CTO have to say.
Bill Crahen
You know it's quite fun, that we get invited to talk to a lot of new organizations. I think it's really the vendors, like Citrix, bringing us in because of the success that we have in partnering with them. We partner so well, and we are specialized in the technology that we can be industry agnostic. We focus on the end-user experience and virtual desktops. But that means that we don't do everything. We do partner very well with other organizations and vendors. Just to make sure that the solutions are successful.
Beau Smithback
I think one of the mistakes that MSPs make is that they try to be all things to all people, and so they do everything "Okay." We try to do a limited set of things to really good fits.
That makes us experts in the actual technology that we are working with. We have our Stakeholder Value Seekers (we don't call them Salespeople) spend a lot of time qualifying customers to ensure that we can be successful with them. So, if we start an engagement, our success rate is near 100% because we have vetted the use case ahead of time and we have vetted the customer for a good cultural fit. We are only working with technologies that we are truly experts in and that leads to very good outcomes.
