DaaS is a technology solution that delivers virtual desktops and applications straight from the cloud to users’ devices. Because some enterprises find it too expensive or time-consuming to create and deploy their own virtual desktops, they pay another company to do it for them.
As a cloud solution, DaaS allows a third party to manage all backed operations so Windows virtual desktops, SaaS applications, and legacy applications can be delivered swiftly and securely to all devices across the enterprise.
DaaS deliver virtual applications via public or private cloud for employees to access through an HTML-based browser or via a secure application on their desktop, laptop, or mobile device. The back-end resources are hosted by a third-party provider that essentially streams virtual desktops to these end-user devices.
Organizations can choose between two types of DaaS:
While persistent desktops are costly and resource-heavy due to more extensive data storage needs, they’re a viable option for users who require a consistent desktop experience.
GPU-accelerated Desktop as a Service (GPU-DaaS) is available for those organizations and industries that need to complete graphics-intensive work on a virtual desktop.
With DaaS, the customer relies on their service provider to manage infrastructure deployment, maintenance, upgrades, backup, storage, and security. These services are available through a subscription model that allows organizations to purchase the precise number of virtual desktops they need for a given period.
The DaaS model provides significant benefits to organizations that use it. One of the most well-known advantages of DaaS is that it can scale up or down according to an organization’s needs, with quick deployment and decommissioning when those needs change.
In addition to the scaling speed, DaaS also provides faster IT response times for remote employees, increasing productivity and reducing downtime, two goals that ultimately impact the bottom line.
Increased productivity isn’t the only way that DaaS boosts enterprise financial profiles. It also provides significant cost-savings to organizations, giving them unmatched flexibility to purchase devices that don’t require as much computing power and avoid investing so much in the back-end management of their virtual desktops.
Finally, one of the main advantages of desktop as a service is that data is stored in a data center rather than on the device itself. This means that lost or stolen devices are much less of an issue, and installing security patches and updates becomes far easier.
Both virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and DaaS allow users to access virtual desktops. However, VDI requires organizations to host and deploy virtual desktops from their own data centers located on the organization’s premises. This requires large, upfront capital investments in infrastructure and in-house IT teams that can manage and update that infrastructure.
Yes, it is important to monitor the availability and performance of DaaS. After all, if your users experience slowness, they will call the IT team that “the desktop is slow” or the “application is slow”. Hence, it is important to have ways to proactively monitor the performance of DaaS. Logon simulators like the eG Enterprise Azure Virtual Desktop logon simulator can help provide proactive alerts regarding DaaS availability and performance. You can also deploy agents inside the virtual desktops to track resource usage within the desktop, slowness originating from within the desktop, etc. In cases where multiple virtual desktops run on the same host, resource bottlenecks in the host can also affect desktop performance. Enterprise monitoring tools like eG Enterprise offer in-depth monitoring of desktop as a service options such as Azure Virtual Desktop, AWS AppStream 2.0 and AWS WorkSpaces.