Other Than Price, What Makes One Desktop as a Service (DaaS) Better Than Others?
Businesses are now accepting work-from-home culture as a permanent industry usual. With this, there comes the responsibility to standardize remote working, rethink communication, restructure security, and improve the budget of remote management.
Therefore, Desktop as a Service is becoming a new trend. DaaS is a virtualization model allowing businesses to deploy their desktops on the cloud and use them as a service via an internet connection. It is similar to VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). The only difference is that we are hosting this VDI on the cloud.
While the infrastructure offered by DaaS at optimum pricing involves security, agility, scalability, customization, etc., how can we select the right provider?
Other than price, what makes one Desktop as a Service (DaaS) provider better than another?
Everyone understands the cost benefits of DaaS, but how can we compare two providers to partner with the right one. Let’s find out.
How To Judge If One DaaS Provider Is Better Than Others?
Judging a DaaS provider on factors other than cost involves a lot of hard work. You need to think about the security, technical aptness, business continuity plan, compliance, user-friendliness, scalability, and remote accessibility.
Below, we have discussed some of these crucial factors to choose which Desktop as a Service provider is better than others.
1. Technical Aptness
Other than Desktop as a Service pricing, the most crucial factor to consider is the technical aptness of your DaaS provider. The right provider will know everything about resource allocation, enterprise requirements, load balancing, and migration.
This Daas provider will help you resolve technical challenges at optimum costs, such as network bandwidth, failover facility, remote access, latency issues, and BYOD compliance.
You also need to evaluate the DaaS provider’s efficiency in virtualization, network topologies, active directory, cloud platforms, and server management abilities. This will help you maximize DaaS availability and reduce business disruptions.
2. Business Continuity
Whether offering low or high DaaS pricing, your DaaS provider should have a business continuity plan. The cloud is about business continuity, as it helps you recover data after a disaster through backup images stored on multiple servers.
Therefore, your Desktop as a Service provider should have a plan for business continuity and desktop recovery. This architecture should be smooth and easy to access.
The reason why business continuity is essential is that it helps you stay prepared for any situation. This is your contingency plan—your exit strategy in case of a disaster or disruption.
3. Ease Of Managing DaaS
Many providers are still expecting you to raise tickets and allow customer support to reach you when your chance arrives. This queue system is outdated, and we honestly don’t have enough time to wait for the DaaS provider to respond in days.
You need ease of executing processes and managing DaaS. Your DaaS provider should train your employees to access DaaS easily, manage work, and respond quickly to queries that entail essential tasks. These can be data backup, recovery, access control, security issues, and compliance queries.
To ensure the efficiency of the support team, you can assess how much the provider is willing to assist you before you have signed the SLA. You can also call customer support and ask questions to know if they are taking a ‘right-now solution’ approach or not.
4. Customizations
There’s no one-size-for-everyone in DaaS. It is a unique implementation for every business according to the needs of the organization and its employees. Therefore, your DaaS provider should offer customization at favorable costs. You should be able to manage resources, efficiency, performance, and other factors depending on the daily needs of your organization.
5. Compliance Support
Today, every business should manage compliance according to the industry, such as banking and insurance or healthcare management. For example, the healthcare industry needs to look after HIPAA to ensure the security of sensitive patient information. Even health insurance companies can’t afford to transfer patient data to any third party unless legally required.
Your Desktop as a Service hosting provider should follow these important industry-specific compliance standards, including ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, etc.
These standards only help you trust that the DaaS service provider offers quality and reliable data center infrastructure and design.
6. Security Considerations
The topmost concern of every business is data security. This is because security on the cloud is crucial to accessing, transmitting, and sharing data.
When your employees are entering the virtual desktop or sharing data files with employees, you need a solid backend to find and eliminate loopholes.
For this, you should ensure the following about your Desktop as a Service provider:
- Multi-factor authentication via external firewalls to identify every person accessing business data and desktops.
- Access control via software firewalls to restrict access inside the organization.
- Regular monitoring through Intrusion Detection and Prevention System, along with patching, auditing, etc.
- Data encryption using TLS 1.3 and 256-bit to ensure secure data transmission and privacy of resting data.
- Regular monitoring of the entire cloud server to catch intrusion and eliminate it on time.
- Use of thin clients on endpoints to avoid sharing and storing data on the device. This allows saving virtual desktops from any theft, intrusion, or any issue on the endpoint.
Finding The Right Desktop as a Service Hosting Provider
Clearly, we can’t use only the cost as the prime differentiating factor. We need to know if the provider is offering optimum services under this pricing.
For example, a provider offering 99.99% uptime at USD X + 20 pricing might be better than the one offering 80% uptime at USD X pricing.
So, evaluate the above differentiating factors and find which provider is better than
others.