How IoT Is Creating New Avenues for DaaS
Many organizations had their business continuity plans tested at the beginning of this year, as employees made the transition from the corporate office to the home office. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability for a corporate office to support a primarily remote workforce is invaluable. High-performing Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions allow you to instantly access virtual desktops that provide enterprise-class connectivity, security and performance. DaaS delivers the equivalent of an in-office desktop experience to your workers connecting remotely to enterprise LANs.
However, it’s important to consider the impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) – which refers to the billions of physical devices around the world connected to the internet – on DaaS. Statista predicts that 75.44 billion devices will be connected worldwide by 2025. While there are many ways to support future IoT trends causing such groundbreaking shifts in the enterprise, DaaS takes the cake.
Consider how today’s current IoT trends will create the following avenues for DaaS to empower businesses.
Optimizing the remote end-user experience
COVID-19 has been a catalyst for the increase of the remote workforce. In fact, a recent Gartner poll showed that 48% of employees will likely work remotely at least part of the time after COVID-19 versus 30% before the pandemic.
In addition to more remote workers, there has also been an increase in the type of devices enterprises have adopted. Many organizations initially lacked the infrastructure to support a fully remote workforce, resulting in employees using their own IoT devices to complete their work.
As a result, IT staff had to quickly re-architect their organization’s IT infrastructure to empower remote workers. To do so, they needed to provision hardware and SaaS applications, while ensuring security, accessibility and procurement of tools and equipment.
To support the IoT connected devices (both personal and corporate) that benefit remote worker productivity, choose a DaaS solution that enables end-users to access work environments and data on any device, anytime, anywhere. This will increase your organization’s operational efficiency and business continuity by giving your employees the flexibility to work from their own smart device.
Securing the enterprise
Security breaches often take place at the edge of the network (i.e., on traditional desktop environments). These physical desktops with locally installed operating systems and applications pose critical cybersecurity risks. If your organization does experience a cybersecurity attack, patching a bunch of individual desktops and IoT devices could take a significant amount of time and cause more damage.
With DaaS, application and security holes can be patched instantly instead of individually across thousands of devices. To ensure that your organization’s data and IoT security is prioritized, choose a DaaS solution that comes pre-integrated with built-in security and compliance. Select a solution that is built into your mobile device management suites that integrates with cloud applications. This will provide a more holistic compliance architecture that extends to every connected device.
Scaling to fit organizational needs
The world around us is constantly evolving, and CIOs and their organizations must evolve with it to remain competitive. As your organization experiences growth, it’s likely that you may need to acquire new businesses, scale based on seasonal business cycles or manage changing IoT technology needs as new employees are onboarded or internal roles change.
With traditional desktop infrastructure, provisioning and de-provisioning IoT devices can be costly and time-consuming. But with DaaS, local desktops move to the cloud, allowing employees to use an online portal to access high performance workstations with secure, responsive virtual desktops. This allows an organization to scale as necessary – whether you’re delivering secure desktops and apps for temporary workers or preparing for your organization's seasonal spike.
Select a complete DaaS solution that gives your organization the ability to quickly and efficiently add users so they can dive into their work immediately. Additionally, ensure that your DaaS platform includes centralized management, which makes it easy to provision new virtual desktops, add new apps and perform upgrades and patching that scales to thousands of virtual desktops.
Empower enterprise IoT with DaaS
As the IoT market continues to soar to new heights, CIOs should consider how DaaS can:
- Optimize the remote end-user experience
- Secure the enterprise
- Scale to fit organizational needs
With so much emerging technology, incorporate a DaaS solution into your infrastructure to prepare for the IoT future. By empowering employees with unparalleled connectivity regardless of location or device, your organization will achieve optimal remote productivity. With the ability to scale according to business needs, you’ll also enjoy consistent low latency performance, regardless of the number of virtual desktops consumed. Finally, you’ll have greater peace of mind knowing that you can perform upgrades and security patches that scale to thousands of virtual desktops.
Derek Siler
Derek has more than 15 years of experience designing and delivering integrated multicloud solutions for enterprise companies. He regularly works with clients throughout their IT transformations, helping power the next phase of their corporate growth.