Successful Desktop as a Service Approach

Desktop as a Service, abbreviated to DaaS, is a platform that securely delivers virtual apps, software, and desktops from the cloud to any device, in any location. Desktop virtualization today has become an extremely sought out concept, with the exponential rise of employees working from home.

This model provides secure SaaS and Legacy applications, along with windows-based virtual desktops to the workforce. Desktop as a Service offers a simple and convenient pay-as-you-go subscription model as well, allowing companies to be on top of their scaling models.

With multiple companies across the world implementing DaaS, the question then arises, ‘how to successfully implement DaaS to maximize efficiency and profits?”. This article addresses the main tips and secrets to the implementation of a successful DaaS system within your enterprise!

How to Successfully Implement DaaS Approach?

Develop a Business Case

The first step to implementing the Desktop as a Service approach into your organization is to build a business case that makes sense to your line of business. Provide your stakeholders and management employees with the necessary supporting documents, which would include the current technologies available and the challenges the company could face.

Identify the costs associated with physical desktop management as well, to justify the migration to DaaS. It is necessary to break down the costs to every stage of implementation, cost of installation, and downtime as well.

Understand the Current Infrastructure

Examine the virtual, offsite, and storage environments to gain a better understanding of a company’s current infrastructure. Assess the organization’s previous rate of virtualization penetration. The purpose is to determine the percentage of the server environment that is virtualized, as well as the vendor mix and distribution of hypervisors.

Review your storage capacity, determine if using green-field storage is a suitable option or if the company can afford to leverage existing infrastructure.

Determine the Desktop User Environment

Break out the percentage of non-employee users in your organization as they too would play a vital role in planning your implementation. Determine user requirements and consider important details like user profile persistence, single vs multiple desktop requirements, granular USB redirection, monitor support, and so on.

Conduct an application virtualization test to analyze import metrics like device drivers installed per application, the total number of application users, and the average load time. By decoupling applications and settings from an OS, managing the endpoints, and making complex upgrades can easily be done!

Access the Physical Desktop Environment

Next, analyze the current desktop environment metrics which include network, CPU, storage, and memory considerations. Assess user profiles, location, and user device to understand mobile needs, offline needs, and the needs of stationary vs dynamic task workers.

Develop a roadmap for the priorities you’ve noticed in all the steps, with regard to implementation. Prioritize users based on complexity factors and determine sizing factors within the DaaS infrastructure. This would involve testing peak time, storage implications for virtual desktops, and performance evaluations from desktop to storage devices.

Desktop as a Service can seriously benefit your organization and the productivity of employees when implemented to improve work conditions beyond what they used to be. When implementing DaaS, keep these above steps in mind to maximize the organization’s efficiency and return on investment!