Desktop as a Service: Flexibility
Envision IT Pressroom | September 14, 2022
Envision IT Pressroom
September 14, 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 Flexibility.
The flexibility of DaaS is often the most immediate concern organizations need to address. There may be a concern about the use of cloud-based resources. Organizations may prefer, perhaps because of a special need, to have in-house systems. DaaS solutions today are virtual desktops. With DaaS, companies have the flexibility to put those virtual desktops close to the data. For DR (disaster recovery) reasons or future potential migration to the public cloud, DaaS has the option to relocate those virtual desktops. DaaS meets organizations where they are on their cloud journey and can facilitate it.
The nature of work is, to say the least, evolving. One of the primary lessons from the pandemic regarding worker attitudes is that people want more flexibility to work from anywhere on any device. Using desktops and laptops, to smartphones and tablets, post-pandemic workers have flexed their productivity muscle and challenged the traditional norms of the workplace. With this evolution, workers are increasingly telling employers that a "work from anywhere" approach is here to stay. Many companies are now supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs as an answer to this evolution.
Organizations that employ BYOD programs allow team members to utilize personal laptops, smartphones, and other devices, rather than company-owned, and IT-managed devices.
As companies look to attract and retain talent, the flexibility that DaaS provides allows them to address the increasing demands of employees for remote solutions. The resulting improvements in hiring and retaining productive employees are the primary benefits of DaaS.
Enhanced user experiences, empowerment of employees to work and collaborate in a way that works best for them, with the freedom to use familiar devices consistent with the company's BYOD security policies, are but a few of the benefits that the flexibility of DaaS facilitates.
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.
