Chapter 3. Picking the Right Desktop
as a Service Solution
There are a variety of desktop-as-a-service offerings, ranging from major cloud
vendors to regional and local providers. It's important to identify the capabilities that
matter most for your company so you can make an educated choice.
Table 1 shows a fairly comprehensive list of selection criteria that could play a role in
your decision. For the purposes of this discussion, let's focus on a few of the most
important considerations:
• Agility
• Flexibility
• Performance
• Security and Compliance
• Partner Ecosystem
• Multi-Cloud Support
If you choose a solution that meets your needs in these six areas, you'll be well on
your way to success.
Agility to Address Uncertainty and Opportunity
Change is the only constant for modern business. Your desktop-as-a-service
provider should make it effortless to ramp the number of user up or down in
response to unexpected new projects, seasonal business variations, or M&A activity.
You don't want to be forced to renegotiate your contract every time you need to
support more users nor may you have the luxury of waiting for your provider to
install new hardware or manually configure software to address your needs.
Specialized client-side software or other complexities that keep users from doing
productive work or tie up hours of administrator time are also an impediment to
business agility.
Flexibility to Support New and
Changing Use Cases
Another important attribute of DaaS is flexibility. For instance, suppose your
customer service team is hosted by a DaaS provider. Are you limited to a specific
VM configuration for each of those seats? What if a new application requires more
computing power?
GPUs are another example. What if you need to support occasional or frequent use
of applications that need GPU acceleration? Make sure the provider you choose will
be able to address your needs—both now and in the future—and give you the
flexibility to evolve as your operational needs change.
"Employees want devices that
enable continuous productivity;
they can't afford to wait around
for an issue to be fixed before
continuing their work. Flexibility
and easy, cross-device experiences
are another must. The majority of
workers value: the ability to access
files and apps from any location or
device; the continuity of passwords
and single sign-on across devices;
and the ability to collaborate with
colleagues in real time."
-Forrester Research
"
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