DaaS: Delivering the Best of VDI and the Cloud

Desktop virtualization is an attractive concept because of its potential to streamline management and support, enhance security and – hopefully – reduce IT costs. But, in reality, implementing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) requires too much upfront capital and complicated integration to make it feasible for most organizations. As a result, despite VDI's advantages, implementations are lagging.

Cloud computing is getting a tremendous amount of interest because of the flexibility and cost savings it delivers by enabling IT organizations to increase capacity and add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure or training personnel. However most of the attention, to date, has focused on moving server workloads to the cloud, and that introduces significant complications, not the least of which is security since this requires moving sensitive corporate data to an external data center beyond your control. As a result, while there's a lot of talk, there hasn't been a lot of movement to the cloud. What's been missing is the "killer service" for enterprises.

DaaS, or desktops as a service, is that service. It marries VDI and cloud computing, and delivers the best of both worlds:

• Realize VDI benefits quickly: By leveraging a cloud-based architecture, enterprises can on-ramp quickly to virtual desktops, add or remove desktop capacity on-the-fly, and immediately realize VDI's centralization, security and ease of management benefits. There's no need for building an infrastructure and no complexity. Enterprise IT and end-users simply access a service provider's infrastructure, which already has the capacity and connectivity assets needed to support a high-performing DaaS environment.
• Save money: With DaaS, there is no upfront CAPEX. DaaS transfers enterprise IT costs from a capital to an operating expense and dramatically reduces the ongoing operating expense of desktops, since there's no longer a need to own or maintain the physical assets needed to host virtual desktops.
• Ensure security: When enterprises shift their desktop environments to the cloud, although the desktop instances have moved, the data and back-end systems are still hosted in the enterprise data center. Therefore, with cloud-based virtual desktops, organizations can keep sensitive data safe within their own infrastructure, and leverage service provider data centers as highly secure, "virtual" branch offices of their enterprise.
• Leverage existing best practices: A true DaaS environment allows for clean separation between the responsibilities of the service provider and the enterprise. The service provider is responsible for everything up to the virtual machines (servers, storage, virtualization software) and the enterprise is responsible for everything inside the VMs (OS image/licensing, application packaging/licensing and user profiles). This allows IT to continue using the best practices and skill sets already employed for managing desktops in the physical world, including those for OS and application deployment, Active Directory, help desk, and security policies. End-users continue to leverage nearly identical operating environments with the added benefit of reliable, anytime, anywhere access to their cloud-hosted desktops.

The Time is Right

The benefits of combining VDI and cloud computing are compelling. And now that the market is seeing services that are specifically architected to enable enterprise-ready DaaS – using a platform that lets service providers manage highly scaled, multi-tenant environments – virtual desktops are finally a financially feasible, attractive solution. Consuming virtual desktops via the cloud with DaaS is an extremely low-risk/high-reward proposition.