The notion that it is sometimes better to rent than to buy may be one of the lasting legacies of the recent downturn. Fortunately for businesses that would like to leverage the benefits of desktop virtualization but are hesitant, given the investment in infrastructure typically required, Dell now offers its two leading VDI solutions, DVS Enterprise and DVS Simplified, in cloud-based “as-a-service” configurations.
In the Power Solutions article “Enhancing Productivity With Desktop-as-a-Service” (DaaS) below, we explain which companies are good candidates for DaaS and the attributes that make our DaaS offerings compelling, even at smaller deployment levels. Both cloud-based DVS Enterprise and DVS Simplified offerings provision rapidly for fast deployment allowing you to get users up and running with minimal disruption during your DaaS migration.
While some IT decision makers have historically considered DaaS options to be risky either because of security or uptime concerns, many CIO’s are increasingly comfortable with accessing corporate data from proven and trusted cloud-based providers. Still others are reconsidering DaaS options after proof-of-concept tests actually enhanced their data security: Rather than having sensitive corporate files floating around outside the firewall either on employees’ personal (and typically insecure) mobile devices or on unauthorized storage sites like Box.net, our DaaS options enable IT departments set policies and limit access as needed. Indeed, our cloud based DVS Enterprise and DVS Simplified options hand control back to IT departments that may have seen it erode or slip away completely due to today’s trends of consumerization and mobile access.
Additionally, our cloud-based DaaS options allow IT departments to get out of the cycle of having to update software and patch operating systems. Since desktops in our DaaS environments are centrally-managed by Dell or remotely by your IT team, patches and updates only have to be made once before being accessed by all users. And if a user’s physical endpoint needs to be serviced or replaced, their downtime can be minimized given that their data resides safely in our datacenter and is not tied to any one particular device. This increases worker productivity, streamlines IT resource management, and allows your IT teams to redirect personnel responsible for end point patching and data center break-fix to more strategic projects. We can manage the operating system, application configuration, and virtual desktops in our DVS Enterprise configuration or enable you to control all elements of the desktop configuration in our DVS Simplified offer.
Finally, our DaaS-based options shift a majority of the capital cost associated with virtual desktop environments to a predictable monthly operating expense by delivering end users’ desktops in a utility billing structure. This allows businesses regardless of their size to leverage our experience in data center design, our best practices for hardware management, and our best hardware including Dell’s latest 12g servers, housed in facilities with more safeguards than the proverbial “third-floor server room.” This approach takes the guesswork and much of the budgetary concern out of the equation, allowing you to focus on your business rather than on infrastructure acquisition and deployment.
Whether your firm is in early start-up mode – hoping to hit the ground running – or is an industry mainstay considering a migration to a trusted DaaS provider, we can accommodate your desktop virtualization needs quickly and efficiently. This is good news for IT and for your business regardless of where the economy goes from here.
Visit dell.com/desktopvirtualization to learn more about the different delivery models and to determine which one works better for your organization.
