VDI technology segments the servers into different virtual machines (VMs), and each VM acts as different virtual desktop instances. These virtual desktops are directly delivered to the end-user. VDI has changed the business functionalities and has increased the employee’s performance as it enabled remote working.
Though many companies still are dependent on physical office desktops, they always look for ways to enable work-from-home. These companies will also be shifting gradually to virtual desktops, according to the market’s predictions.
However, companies who adopt on-premise VDI in which desktops are created on office premise servers face challenges due to the vast upfront capital involved in setting up servers and infrastructure for creating virtual desktop environments.
Though VDI has been doing pretty well in the market, companies are looking for options to save the costs involved in setting up VDI.
Cloud VDI has come up as a solution to all the on-premise challenges. This is a technology in which virtual desktops are created from a server kept at some external location, mainly on the cloud. Cloud VDI is offered by third-party providers and is known as desktop as a service or DaaS.
What is Desktop as a Service (DaaS)?
DaaS is an offering by third-party providers, wherein they create hosted virtual desktops with pre-installed applications on their cloud servers. These virtual desktops are delivered to the customers’ end-point devices. Providers take the burden off your shoulders and give entirely managed desktops.
Industries like accountancy, medical, legal, retail, manufacturing, and many more have adopted DaaS and have seen significant growth in the past few years. According to Gartner’s study, DaaS is expected to have revenue growth of $1.9 billion in the year 2021 from $616 million in 2019.
Big giants like VMware and Citrix are available in the market and play a significant role in the VDI space. More new companies always try to put their hands in the virtual space and test recent tech trends and give the best solutions to the industries. Moreover, providers partner with VMware and Citrix to offer entirely managed or customized services in the virtual desktop sphere.
What did on-premise VDI technology give to the companies until now?
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Enabled Remote Working
Employees can work with complete flexibility of time and location. They can efficiently work from their devices such as laptops, tablets, or phones from remote areas. This improves their performance and productivity as they can maintain a work-life balance.
Easy Provisioning
Virtual desktops are created instantly from the servers kept at the office premises. Though companies need to keep a specialized IT team for this, it is still a quick process. Admin controls can be completely given to the owners, and you can provide access to the particular employees according to their roles.
Scalability
Even if your team size increases or decreases, you can quickly scale up or down the number of desktops used at a particular time. Moreover, the RAM and storage capacity could also be increased or decreased for a specific employee’s desktop according to their need.
Though there were many positive things that VDI offers but there are still many that VDI on-premise was not able to provide, and there DaaS played an important role.
Why is the future for DaaS here now?
There are plenty of reasons that denote that DaaS is the current and future of businesses. Let’s see some of the many reasons.
High Security
With physical desktops and VDI on-premise, many data breach problems and cyber threats happen day and night. Companies face severe consequences when crucial customer data is stolen or hacked by hackers. Security became a major issue that needs to be resolved.
DaaS helps you attain physical security of storage devices and gives you data protection to a great extent. Providers store your data in high-security data centers with 24/7 CCTV surveillance.
Moreover, all the data is protected under multiple security safeguards like –
- Intrusion detection and prevention.
- OS patching.
- Antivirus management.
- end-to-end data encryption.
- DDoS protection.
Reduced Office Infrastructure
Companies face difficulty in managing and maintaining these bulky servers or desktops. This wastes a lot of energy and time, and mainly the expenditure becomes high. Moreover, a significant area of office space is utilized by the bulky servers, LAN cabling, and desktops or other hardware devices.
DaaS resolves this issue altogether. Due to the remote work, physical desktops are reduced on office premises, and hence the cabling requirement decreases. As the virtual desktops are hosted from providers’ cloud servers, there is no need to keep the bulky hardware on your office premises.
Not only this, you need not keep the storage hard drives and discs and take care of them as all the storage is on the provider’s data centers.
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Expense Reduction
As in the on-premise VDI, there are many software and bulky servers that are needed to be set up in the office. It takes a huge substantial investment to install the complete setup. It’s not always easy to invest huge upfront capital for a company and mainly SMBs or startups.
Cloud-hosted VDI desktops offered by DaaS providers help you reduce your office infra, hardware and hence, you can save on your pocket. As there is no need for cabling, maintaining, upgrading, or updating desktops regularly, you can have cost-cutting.
Moreover, DaaS providers offer you a pay-as-you-go model to pay them on a monthly or yearly subscription basis. You can shift your capital expense to operational expenses. You can also negotiate with the providers as they are happy to give you discounts if you work on a long-term contract basis.
Enables Green IT
As pollution has become a primary global concern, it is always better to contribute a bit to the environment. With physical desktops, massive office cabling, and regularly discarding hardware devices, tons of electronic indisposable waste are produced every year. Also, energy consumption has peaked and led to hazardous carbon emissions.
Companies around the globe have realized and started using best practices to cope with pollution. By adopting DaaS, you can reduce your electronic wastes produced every month. Due to the remote work, no need for an air-conditioned office environment can save electricity and decrease carbon emissions.
Providers have started using green data centers. These data centers run on renewable resources and reduce carbon footprints. You can always rely on these centers and contribute towards a healthy environment.
Business Continuity
Companies have to waste hours after hours because of technical glitches. They will discontinue their business if they become a victim of any mishap or natural disasters. Any data storage or hardware device kept in your office premises is open to natural destructions like fire or collapsed buildings due to earthquakes.
With DaaS, you get an uptime of 99.999% to not waste your time during business hours because of any server downtime. DaaS providers also offer you additional services like DRaaS to have business continuity even during disasters like floods or earthquakes.
DRaaS is disaster recovery as a service in which providers replicate your data in multiple data centers kept at different locations. Hence, disruption at one place does not lead to data loss as data is automatically backed up at other data centers.
Graphics Intensive Applications
With physical desktops, it is tough to run high graphics applications. If your personal computers do not have the right high-end configuration, then developers and designers who work on such applications face many speed issues. This is a concern even in the on-premise VDI because installing and managing such applications takes time and increases cost.
With DaaS, providers take care of installing and updating such apps as they have a dedicated IT team for such tasks. The providers install these apps on their cloud servers. So, you don’t even need a high-end personal computer to run the same.
Providers help you run applications directly via a browser on your device. Rather than installing the apps on different high-end PCs and increasing its cost, providers virtualize the app hosted on the cloud for multiple users.
Consultation and Support
With on-premise VDI, you cannot take a consultation or take IT support in case of a glitch or deploy virtual desktops. It becomes a challenge to resolve issues, and this results in wastage of time in business. Even if you take support from the server company, IT professionals will need some time to reach your place and look after the issue. Offices that work night shifts can also face problems as it is problematic to resolve IT issues at night.
With DaaS, providers give you 24×7 IT support via phones, chats, or emails. As the desktops are hosted from their data centers, significantly less time is needed to resolve any IT issue. Professionals are trained to deploy the desktops in no time.
Even in the nights, they look after your IT glitches and resolve them. They provide these services as an additional feature over their plans. Moreover, they even offer you free consultations according to your business needs.
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Takeaways
I have discussed some of the significant reasons that define why cloud VDI technology by a third-party provider or DaaS has emerged in the industry.
Due to all these advantages like security, data backups, reduced cost, and others, cloud VDI technology is the current and the future. VDI and DaaS services by a provider have seen an inclined growth and will continue to do so.
Pandemic became a reason and was a force behind adopting cloud VDI technology and DaaS at a fast pace. But now it has become necessary in every industry.
This article is written by Yuvraj Jain. Yuvraj is a technology analyst at ACE Cloud Hosting, a leading VDI solutions provider. He is keen to write about the latest tech trends and is fond of exploring VDI technology, DaaS, hosted virtual desktop, and cloud hosting services.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
