8 Reasons to Move 20% of Your Users to DaaS

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is an IT strategy where your desktop infrastructure is virtualised and delivered via a third-party provider. It is an alternative to the traditional IT management strategy where servers, desktops, and storage are all on-premises.

Moving your users to DaaS can deliver a range of benefits. What about starting with 20 percent of your users? Why is this an effective DaaS migration approach?

Here are eight reasons for moving 20 percent of your users to DaaS.

Managing on-premises IT infrastructure is costly and resource-intensive. Moving to DaaS significantly reduces the amount of IT equipment and infrastructure that you need on-site, reducing capital expenditure.

Your DaaS provider will also take over a lot of the IT management tasks that are currently looked after by your in-house team. This also reduces costs while simplifying IT management.

If DaaS reduces costs, simplifies IT management, and delivers other benefits, why are we only focusing on 20 percent of users? Why not all users or a higher percentage?

The figure of 20 percent is a guide. The concept behind it is to focus only on those users in your organisation that have the lowest app and performance needs. These users will be the easiest to migrate, reducing the pressures and workload of your IT staff and support teams during the DaaS project.

In fact, using tools like Access Capture, you will be able to automate large parts of the migration process, as you will only be focusing on apps and users that are easier to migrate.

The initial batch of users that you migrate to DaaS will also provide a foundation for adding more in the future. This includes giving you an opportunity to streamline the process before you start migrating a larger and/or more difficult batch of users, as well as ensuring your app delivery strategy is aligned with your DaaS goals.

In other words, you can use the experience of migrating easier users to make sure you are ready for a more widescale DaaS deployment.

On-premises IT infrastructure makes it more difficult for your teams to work remotely. DaaS, on the other hand, makes anywhere, anytime working seamless. So long as your users have an internet connection and a device, they will be able to access their work desktop and everything they need to remain productive, including apps and data. This could be in the office, on-site with a customer on the other side of the world, at home, or anywhere else.

We’ve already touched on the point that DaaS simplifies IT management. One of the ways it does this is that DaaS also simplifies your IT infrastructure. Rather than having different equipment from different vendors at varying stages of maturity, you will have a single service level agreement with a DaaS provider.

This simplified IT infrastructure also enhances flexibility, as you can scale as you need to by simply updating the service you have with your DaaS provider. This is much simpler than, for example, facilitating the addition of users by adding new hardware to increase VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) capacity.

There are two main areas to highlight with this point:

• As already mentioned, by focusing first on the easiest 20 percent of users, your IT team won’t be stretched to capacity with the DaaS migration project. Instead, they will have the time they need to focus on other tasks, including planning for additional DaaS migration phases.

• Over the longer term, simplified IT infrastructure and management processes will also free up your IT team, as they won’t need to focus on day-to-day management tasks such as updating Windows. Your DaaS provider will look after those jobs while your IT team gets on with tasks that are more value-adding to the business.

With a traditional IT infrastructure where there are physical desktops on-prem, data management and storage can be a headache. For example, users might save important files locally on their desktop rather than on the network, making it difficult to retrieve the data in the future. It’s also much harder to secure and back up data when it is being stored in multiple locations.

Switching to DaaS eliminates these headaches for the 20 percent of users that you migrate. For those users, all the data they create, update, and use will be stored in one location – a location that is easier to secure.

Following on from the point above, backup and disaster recovery processes are more streamlined with a DaaS strategy. Backups will be stored offsite, while users can continue to log into their desktops on any device, even in disaster situations.

You may have looked at DaaS in the past and can see the benefits. The challenge is to complete a DaaS migration project smoothly and with as little impact on business operations as possible. Starting with the easiest 20 percent of users is the answer.

There will be minimal friction or challenges with those 20 percent of users, and you can use the experience to inform future decisions and planning.

In other words, starting with a small group of the easiest users means you can launch a DaaS migration project almost immediately, putting your organisation on a path to lower-cost IT that is easier to manage.