2021 hasn’t been easy for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) affected by the pandemic and the swift urge to shift from premises-based to remotely operating workspaces for their employees. Nevertheless, despite the oppressive circumstances, the adaptive and competitive enterprises managed to use the new normal as a digital transformation challenge, and as an opportunity for growth in size and operations. Solutions such as Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) gave the SMB a readily available alternative not only to continue with their workload as normal but also to save from big capital investments and operational costs for IT support over the whole course of the year.

How did DaaS help the SMB in 2021?

By giving the SMB simplification

 

One of the key benefits of DaaS for small and mid-sized businesses was without a doubt the elimination of complexity with regards to managing the technical aspects of their hardware infrastructure. Not every business has an in-house IT team to support the maintenance and resolve the problems of all employees working remotely. And also the ones that do have an IT department are often buried out in servicing issues and routine ticketing requests that take important time away from the core technical teams. Using a DaaS provider like we-IT has been critical for those SMB that had to transition quickly to a new working model without compromising on the simplicity of their operations and the productivity of their bottom line.

Reducing CapEx and OpEx

 

Getting your SMB off the ground by investing big capital portions in infrastructure can be a costly undertaking. Even though physical devices are becoming more affordable over the years, security, servicing, configurations, and availability must also be considered. A lot of companies could not afford to purchase their own servers, storage rooms and hire support staff on-premises to maintain their deployments, but they were also not in a position to compromise their data security by not implementing a secure in-house server setup. This is where DaaS came to the rescue, making the security and operational agility possible only at a monthly subscription fee. According to a recent survey of SMBs which have undergone the transition to cloud-hosted desktop environments, the majority of the respondents said that their businesses managed to cut their budgets dedicated to IT expenses by almost 50% (after moving to DaaS).

A flexible workforce is the future

 

The vast majority of the businesses by the end of 2021 managed to move some of all of their operations away from their office premises. And even though that change met some resistance at the start, today it is being embraced more fervently by employers mainly due to the increase in flexibility and job satisfaction that this model has to offer. Many people these days prefer the flexibility they have when working from home and a lot of them even say that their new routine is allowing them to be more productive since structuring workloads relies entirely on their own schedule and efficiency. And yet, despite being a largely beneficial transition for the SMB, there have still been some challenges that companies needed to overcome. Accessing sensitive files and information was initially a worry, which DaaS resolved and proved to be insubstantial for those businesses fearing the transition.

Security At The Forefront for SMB

 

This is one of the key benefits for small businesses that moved to the cloud by necessity rather than making the conscious choice of prioritizing their data security. Cloud desktop providers like we-It have spent countless hours establishing a solution that offers the SMB a secure alternative for their remote workspaces. Those businesses that have already migrated their data to the cloud have experienced the cybersecurity benefits of their desktop environments including the improved threat detection and prevention tools, integrated monitoring, advanced firewall, and a whole range of other security strategies and protocols implemented by industry professionals such as cloud desktop providers. Data protection is at the forefront with this technology and SMB take no risks by leaving their information in the safe hands of the highly safeguarded data centers of their third-party provider. On top of that, DaaS has also served these businesses as a complementary disaster recovery plan which many enterprises would normally pay and use additionally to their suite of managed IT services.

The world of the remote working force has changed for long or for good in the past year. Every SMB could embrace its digital transformation journey thanks to services such as DaaS. This is why we expect the market to continue expanding and evolving in response to the growing demand by small businesses and to their needs for effective and affordable technological solutions.