Another look at DaaS and VDI
What has been firmly established by now is that every remotely operating business needs to provide its employees with the tools and IT resources required to manage their workloads on a daily basis. Prior to the global pandemic, there was a clear trend by companies with higher CPU and GPU requirements to ensure that there were desktop PCs and legacy servers in place, keeping the operations running mainly on-site without the use of the internet. However, all of a sudden, this set-up became extremely limiting for businesses looking to transition to remote off-premises operation. So, this is where DaaS (Desktop-as-a-Service) and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) came into play.
In the first business quarter of 2021, the global market of PCs has seen the biggest increase in sales ever since the early 2000s. Nearly 70 million PCs were purchased globally, which is 32% more than the spike that the industry had seen in 2020. The message was clear. Customers were changing their approach and finding new ways to support their remote workforce with the help of cloud-based solutions such as DaaS, SaaS, and VDI.
What is DaaS?
We have talked in a lot of detail about the functions and benefits of DaaS with regards to small, mid, and large-sized businesses. Hereby, we are giving you only a small overview of the capabilities of this virtual desktop solution for the sake of explaining its winning position in the marketplace at the moment and clearing out the ambiguities between the two definitions.
DaaS is a virtual desktop infrastructure, similar to VDI, which instead of being hosted on-site by the company using the solution, is provided by a third-party company such as we-IT from the dedicated data centers of the cloud provider. This immediately gives you an idea of how and why DaaS managed to outstrip its main competitor over the last year: by being more affordable and accessible to smaller enterprises. Offering desktops as a service from a multi-tenet cloud gives companies the chance to outsource the whole composite of computing resources needed to make the workforce mobile and efficient. This includes cloud storage, cybersecurity, OS licensing, and in the case of we-IT: recurrent maintenance and security awareness training for employees.
VDI vs DaaS
Unlike DaaS, where all of the investment in infrastructure and upkeep falls in the hands of the cloud desktop vendor, VDI requires complete dedication and capital investment in setup and technical support. The difference between the two models is big, even though the technology underlying both of them is roughly the same. DaaS works a lot like SasS (Software-as-a-Service) in a way that the customer can pay for the resources they have used monthly with the service. A simple shift in provision and availability has made DaaS a preferred model for millions of businesses worldwide, demanding a streamlined and consistent user experience for their applications. VDI and DaaS are both accessible from remote locations over the internet, from any mobile device or a PC. Nevertheless, the widespread utilization of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model of work has somehow made VDI obsolete due to the problems that IT departments usually encounter with regard to cybersecurity and infrastructure monitoring. In that sense, DaaS also managed to overtake VDI by making BYOD plausible, more affordable overall, and most importantly, highly secure. Cloud vendors like we-IT work round the clock to make sure that everyone managing their workloads from our cloud is safe against malicious threats at all times.
How has BYOD made DaaS the more popular choice?
Thanks to successful models like DaaS, the global BYOD industry is growing and expanding each year. By 2027, Bring Your Own Device is expected to grow by 16.7% and have a global exposure over the majority of the enterprise supporting a mobile workforce from home or anywhere remotely. Another reason for the upsurge in BYOD popularity in the last couple of years is the shortage of chips for desktop PCs, encouraging more enterprises to look for cheaper alternatives such as tablets, laptops, in combination with DaaS on a pay-per-use model.
Are we expecting DaaS to completely replace desktop PCs and VDI?
The digital transformation of companies has been kick-started towards adopting cloud-hosted solutions since the very beginning of 2020. Whether it is VDI or DaaS, we know for sure that the cloud desktop market is expanding steeply and employers will have an ever-increasing demand for powerful workstations for their employees. Desktop-as-a-Service is continuously evolving as a technology that is there to support the needs of businesses from all sectors and IT requirements. There are still challenges that DaaS has to overcome but so far, one thing is for sure, the future looks promising and no business is likely to give up on the higher performance and cost savings that the model has to offer, compared to everything else currently on the marketplace.