Desktop as a Service: Cost Savings
Envision IT Pressroom | October 27, 2022
Envision IT Pressroom
October 27, 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 Cost Savings.
If you look at just the cost of DaaS, and you don't look at offset costs, you're not having an ROI discussion. To analyze and implement DaaS properly, you should understand: What are you going to be using to deliver it? How do security concerns play into the plan? What does that do for your risk profile and potential cyber insurance costs? What does it cost to do it with DaaS versus on-premise? If you're engaged in a true ROI discussion, you're looking at the labor to maintain all your current physical workstations. When you start to dig in for a more accurate representation of costs, DaaS can look more attractive.
There are many parts of that the ROI discussion that may not be classified as hard dollars as well. Management, security, and the value of the user experience factors should also be considered for a holistic understanding of cost.
For example, working with a regional Acute Care Provider Envision IT started with an ROI calculation attempting to understand the value of expanding virtual desktops in their environment vs. continuing to do what they had been doing with 4,000 physical workstations. In addition to the very significant equipment and license cost offsets, the implementation of DaaS resulted in major savings of $5mm over five years related to IT management and service ticket costs. Plus, it turned out that with productivity gains alone, providers could see one more patient per day in their ambulatory services. That generated substantial incremental revenue. Simply reducing the login wait allowed for more patient encounters.
One additional way to look at cost savings is the "total cost of ownership." When you look at the total cost of ownership of a workstation it's usually somewhere between four and five times the cost of the actual workstation over its lifetime.
DaaS gives organizations extra automation and flexibility. On nights and weekends, it's typical that you don't need all virtual desktop resources running all the time. Policies can be set that can scale back all the machines at a specific time or during non-working hours. This helps reduce cloud costs since you’re not paying for resources when you’re not using them. And users don’t notice because they're not in the system, or capacity can be left to account for shifts.
Labor savings is also a significant factor when analyzing ROI. If you have a problem with a virtual desktop, you reboot it you get a new virtual desktop. That's unlike a physical workstation that goes down. That user is not able to work resulting in productivity losses along with time spent per engineer trying to get it back into working order. It is a lot easier and cost-effective with DaaS to simply log out and log back in.
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.
