PREPARING ENTERPRISES FOR DESKTOP AS A SERVICE ADOPTION

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the major initiatives that took place was investigating options for enabling office workers to continue working from home. This mass exodus from offices to homes necessitated organizations to investigate all possible solutions—from big laptop buys to public cloud Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings—for allowing employees to continue working safely and securely. 

Out of this ‘black swan’ event, DaaS adoption skyrocketed, presenting a whole new list of challenges to IT Operations teams and users in how they consumed their desktop or application experience. In geographically distributed user bases, this was exacerbated by leveraging home internet solutions that could vary wildly in terms of speed/latency, availability, and limited solutions for Operations teams to troubleshoot performance without metric-driven details. This became the equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack in a new barn that nobody has worked in before. While Desktop-as-a-Service vendors are quickly adding new features and capabilities, the end-to-end visibility and troubleshooting solutions for the support teams still have a long way togo before they will match solutions like VMware Horizon or Citrix from an ease of operations and visibility standpoint. 

Operations teams need better visibility in DaaS environments to understand issues as they arise and troubleshoot the root of the problem. No longer are users simply connecting via VPN with all applications sitting in a data center. Rather, some applications are in AWS or Azure, some are still in a legacy data center, and some are Software-as-a-Service solutions. This application sprawl has ultimately created more work for IT Ops teams and presented them with the need for solutions to mitigate the variability. 

This whitepaper will not dive into the economics of Desktop-as-a-Service solutions, Microsoft licensing, or which public cloud provider’s solution has more widgets. Instead, we will focus on four key areas of consideration that Operations teams should consider prior to migrating into a DaaS solution and the many questions that must be answered to ensure that organizations are covering their bases and setting themselves up for success. 

Download the full whitepaper to learn more.